I want to show the richness of even the most disagreeable bits of life.
I’m from England, and like every other great empire who stole bits of the world, there is a price to pay. And I was born in 1935. So, since I’ve been conscious of the world, I’ve either been in, or been on the periphery of, a war zone.
I’ve found that I snack less and concentrate better when I chew on a plastic stirrer – the kind that you get to stir your to-go coffee. I picked up this habit from my husband, who loves to chew on things. His favorite chew-toy is a plastic pen top, and gnawed pen tops and little bits of plastic litter our apartment.
I don’t want to do the same thing all the time, and I was thrilled to bits to do a BBC comedy. It’s the home of British comedy.
I’ve two huge German shepherds who are my boys. They’re called Biscuit and Buster, and I love them to bits.
I always overwrite – really awful, long bits of script – and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories, I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does, I feel that that’s a successful story.
When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father’s French, and I speak French, and there’s a kind of struggle in me that says, ‘I’d like to be French.’ But I’ve never been fully part of that culture, that role.
I no longer say I’m unemployed. I say I’m unemployable. It’s different. An unemployed suggests at a certain point in the future, you might be employed. That’s not the case with me. I’m unemployable, and unfortunately, that’s one of the bits of the web, in particular of Google.
My training was that you fill in the canvas where it needs colour and polishing. You start with the words on the first night and keep adding bits of business.
I think that most things, if you want to use them properly, take quite a lot of time and I don’t necessarily have the patience to sit down and read the instructions and follow the first bits to actually get the starting point.
I have so many funny friends that I hang out and do bits with, and the fact that we can hire each other is amazing. I asked all of them to help make ‘Kroll Show’ the best that it can be. I’m selfishly trying to use their funny genius for my own benefit.
What was so good about it was that the set that they originally built stayed there, and weathered over the five years. It got five summers and five winters of weather. It became more and more authentic as we worked in it, and they added bits to it.
These things don’t just come, arrive and settle like a bird picking up a few bits of crumbs. They develop. I think the best word for these things is develop. They develop because of the human beings who just happen to be there at the time.
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife’s money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
I won’t say I wouldn’t be grateful and happy and delighted and thrilled to bits to receive a nomination. But I wouldn’t be suicidal if it didn’t happen.
It’s not that the system is broken, but clearly there are ways to improve the system, strengthen it, to make sure that we can put together the various bits and pieces of information in a way that allows us to stop every single terrorist out there.
My taste in music originates from my culture and heritage, and from traveling the world and listening to all kinds of fun sounds and bits.
Sometimes I use my jokes as building blocks for larger bits. I like to draw and play music, so sometimes I do those things along with the jokes.
It’s like, the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in, and your day is shredded to bits because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you’re pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it’s lunch, then you have something else to do.
When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting – the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness – or into waves of probability.
The bits I most remember about my school days are those that took place outside the classroom, as we were taken on countless theatre visits and trips to places of interest.
I used to wear these big shapeless clothes and ended up just looking like a potato in a sack. I’ve learnt now to accentuate the bits that I’m happiest with. That’s probably my waist – a lot of my clothes go in at the waist and emphasise my hips, which I’m very proud of.
I’d never done a straight play before, never, and it was very hard work – really, really hard work. It was dense, really wordy, and I was determined to learn every word of it – not just skip over bits and pieces.
If you looked at the sound pattern of an old-fashioned record, it would be very spikey. But nowadays, there’s no spikes – everything looks like a brick, so the quiet bits become louder. It’s actually damaging because it’s like listening to a drill.
I would radically redesign early years education to learn from the best bits of the Finnish system.
Too often, politics is like bad theater. The mass media simplifies stories and personalities into their most basic, digestible and familiar bits. Listeners prefer songs they have heard before, after all.
I’m a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.
That’s the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You’re left, stuck, in the studio. And that’s a shame. You’re making a movie. You don’t want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie – to move.
I think it’s important, whether it be learning from how a guy takes care of his body, how a guy studies, how a guy is a mentor, how a guy is a leader, you take bits and pieces that fit the person you are and you don’t try to be somebody you’re not.
I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets – tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides. I collected a shiver of china bits, with borders of larkspur and birds or braids of daisies. No two patterns ever matched.
‘Liv and Maddie’ actually started out as a different show called ‘Bits and Pieces,’ and it was a completely different plot, although it was the same cast.
‘Macbeth’ is one of the best operas ever, and doing it was a great experience. I added some things to the opera based from my experience on the movie – such as some of the special effects and bits of film – to make it new and interesting. It was a very good work and a very good experience.
The only difficult thing is learning to recognise the interesting bits from those millions of moments life provides you with every day and writing down those snippets.
I got involved in lots of different areas round about 2007, 2008. Just working with lots of different people and stretching myself in different ways. I was working on art projects and working with other writers, just doing bits and pieces, trying to keep busy.
I went to a quite macho art school in the 1970s, and while everyone was making hulking big sculptures, I was making things out of bits of paper.
I am fascinated by people’s flaws and delusions: all the messy bits of human nature we all try to pretend we don’t have.
I started buying bits of broken porcelain. I furnished our first flat with pieces of ‘junk.’ Some of that ‘junk’ is now worth an awful lot of money. What I was calling ‘junk’ in the ’60s people wouldn’t call ‘junk’ now.
We talked a lot about The Best Intentions and how we could shoot certain scenes in different ways with slightly different bits of dialogue and information, so that later on, we could cut the piece more easily and it would still feel complete, even though it was shorter.
That idea of not always being in control of the primitive parts of yourself – the bits that fall in love or the bits that dance or lose the plot or drink too much – and putting that across… that’s pop for me. It’s playing with all the different colours of the rainbow of life.
My son likes Doctor Seuss books, but they’re right tongue twisters. You get to certain bits and you stumble your words and it makes you feel like an idiot.
In ‘Top Gear,’ everything goes wrong because you have Jeremy Clarkson, so any practical activity ends in a pile of bits.
Well, I spent 23 years in politics, and bits of that were fun.
I know a lot of actors who have said to me, ‘who’d have thought you could put a two-shot on screen for twenty minutes and people would be absolutely locked in, how does that work?’ Well it does work, when the story is great and you’ve got these fabulous twists and turns – so those are my favorite bits!
Some actors can distance themselves from the parts they play, but I fall into the category who use bits of themselves.
The thing to keep in mind is that’s how I started long before MTV and Twitter and Facebook. I studied at broadcasting school so I could learn how to shoot and edit videos, and tried to create my own television show so we could see through these wacky visions we had of funny bits we wanted to shoot.
The art of the bird is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind.
