Fortunately I own a vintage brain, and I am alive and well in the 21st century, still making records, still working at an intense pace and most of all, still having fun doing it.
Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little more than a century ago?
Basically, after an ABC sitcom I did, I ended up with a holding deal with 20th Century Fox. Absolutely cool. It pays you to be unemployed. And the bigger the entity that gives you the deal, the better.
It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.
The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.
Like probably a lot of people, I came away from watching films like ‘Miss Representation’ and ‘Half the Sky’ with the realization that the battle for women’s rights is not over, especially not globally, and that the moral imperative of our century is to achieve full rights for everyone regardless of gender.
The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It’s able to connect young people in a deep way to language… it’s language as play.
I think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy… If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer’s disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people.
In fact, 37 percent of all United States Nobel Prize winners in the 20th century have been representatives of the Jewish community.
In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics – an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.
In the old days, people shared music; they didn’t care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.
I wanted to explore cancer not just biologically, but metaphorically. The idea that tuberculosis in the 19th century possessed the same kind of frightening and decaying quality was very interesting to me, and it seemed that one could explore the idea that every age defined its own illness.
While there is a great value in things that are old, it seems that the overwhelming challenge in Britain in the late 20th century is to make every effort to see value in the contemporary and in the future.
If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.
