I love science fiction, and one of the things I love about it is that it’s so very different. You can read stuff that’s just fast-paced adventure, and the characters are cardboard, but who cares, because they’re heroes, and we love it. And you can read stuff that’s really deep character, and everything in between.
I believe love isn’t simple, and it’s one of the things that makes people break all the rules.
One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.
The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just ‘Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?’ But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions.
One of the things I strive for is realism. I need to be as real as possible in the dilemmas my characters face.
One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.
One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.
I think one of the things that people take for granted when they watch a film is the actors have to exhibit an extraordinary amount of force to block out the stuff that isn’t a part of their reality. And when the audience sees it, they’re seeing everything the actor isn’t seeing.
One of the things that’s interesting is that the PC has always had a huge amount of scalability. It was sort of the wild dog that moved into Australia and killed all the local life because it could just adapt. There used to be these dedicated devices, like dedicated word processors.
Defense spending as a share of the economy dropped significantly during the early 1990s, and that was one of the things, along with other policy changes, that put us back on the path to a balanced budget.
One of the things I love about Africa is the amount of dignity and respect and humility you see all the time. You don’t realise how often you’re disrespected until you are surrounded by respect.
I am divorced, and one of the things I am tremendously grateful for is that my ex-husband and I made a decision to go through mediation. I knew a trial would drag on for years, would cost me everything, but worse, would be devastating for our four small children.
I think one of the things that we are facing right now is that we’ve stopped listening to each other in our politics.
One of the things that I always say about bioterrorism, whether it’s ourselves at the federal level, folks at the state level, or folks in the private industry, we’ve done many great things, especially since 9/11.
One of the things that comedy has given me over the years is a really good ability to laugh at myself and to not take things that don’t matter too much too seriously. I feel that very little offends me anymore and I’m really grateful for that because I think I was a pretty uptight little kid.
Well, Australians should speak for the national interests of Australia, and whatever role former Australian prime ministers may have, one of the things you do is speak frankly about the country as you see the country’s best interests, you know?
One of the things I’ve done on my shows is tell stories and do interviews.
Overall, one of the things that excites me most about self-publishing is that the highest-value use of my time in promoting the books will be found in writing more of them.
One of the things that makes any good entertainment, whether it’s a play, drama, comedy, television, film, whatever, is that you feel a certain amount of spontaneity.
That’s one of the things I resent the most violently. To have to take your own life and give it away to the public, in pieces.
One of the things I’ve realised is that I am very simple. My wife asked me once if I loved her. I said: ‘Look love, I’m a simple man. I love you. End of story.’ But I guess you gotta keep saying it with women. I guess she needed reassurance.
One of the things that evangelicals do really, really well is to make giving a joyous, social enterprise. Too often, the world sees giving as a burden, a sacrifice, when in fact it’s more like an opportunity to help others and oneself at the same time.
I came back from Standing Rock, and one of the things that struck me was their respect for elders. It was something that I felt like I needed to work on in my life.
One of the things that helps me tell a story through music is to create a character. I have to have a muse, whether it’s Frida Kahlo, Martha Graham, Marlene Dietrich, or Pippi Longstocking.
One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider’s outsider.
I think one of the things I regret was not having more faith in myself early on.
One of the things that science fiction gets to do is thought experiments about the human condition that would be impractical or unethical to conduct in real life.
One of the things that we have to realize is we cannot get off gas, we cannot get off oil, fossil fuels tomorrow – it’s going to take a few decades. Maybe we can shorten it, but there’s going to have to be a transition time.
One of the things Mother said to me, ‘You want this, you’re going to practice.’ And I know how to practice.
One of the things that defines YA is a really strong narrative. Adults love YA because, at the end of the day, they’re good stories and page-turners. The other element is emotion. The teen years are a very emotional and intense time, and I think it’s a time we that we can all relate to and remember.
One of the things I like about when I tour sometimes is that occasionally you’ll see a dad there with his 12-year-old son and they’re both enjoying it.
One of the things that the Grateful Dead did, way back when, was we spent a lot of time just turning each other on to music. If somebody was listening to something that really caught their ear, they’d make sure that everybody else in the band heard it, and that came home for us in innumerable ways.
One of the things about runways that I hate is that you can’t accommodate so many people because you don’t have those in-and-out privileges where people can come and go.
I think one of the things about reinforcement learning is that it tends to require exploration. So using it in the context of physical systems is somewhat hard.
In my career, there have been many things I am fortunate enough to be proud of. Yet one of the things I feel most strongly about is the culture we created during the ten years I was at Aetna, and its enduring impact.
One of the things I do as a food writer is to take a classic recipe made with meat, look at it a whole lot, and tinker with it according to my taste.
One of the things that was a blessing for me is my parents were music lovers. Neither of my parents played an instrument, but they were avid record buyers. And I grew up at every age listening to all kinds of music.
One of the things that I try to do when I have a tough time with anything – whatever it may be – is just look at someone else’s situation. Here in Staten Island, look, I have people that have children that haven’t been back in their home for 18 months after Sandy. They lost every worldly possession.
One of the things I love about doing television is that I don’t feel like I’m just purely a writer. I like all of the opportunities television affords to kind of build a brand that can work across platforms, so I’m not just solely at my computer in my pajamas all day.
One of the things I think is important about ‘Watchmen’ is that it have resonance within cinematic pop culture as well as superhero culture.
There is no doubt that Boulder was a supportive and open-door community well before TechStars ever existed. But one of the things that I’m most proud of is that TechStars has provided a real focal point for this sort of activity and has brought attention to just how impactful one community can be when it works together.
One of the things I love about Joel and Ethan Coen’s movies is that there is this element of the ethereal and the mythic that they play with.
Life expectancy in many parts of Africa can be something around the age of thirty five to thirty eight. I mean you’re very fortunate if you live to that age. In fact when I went to Uganda for the first time one of the things that occurred to me was that I saw very few elderly people.
American people have the ability to laugh at themselves. It is one of the things that makes this country the great country that it is.
One of the things I find depressing about some of the upper echelons of Anglicanism on both sides of the Atlantic is that it’s sort of taken for granted that we all basically know what’s in the Bible, and so we just glance at a few verses for devotional purposes and then get on to the real business.
When you’re working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum.
And one of the things we did here was we put the maximum amount of money up front in those cities that were at the greater risk, but that doesn’t mean that we keep rebuilding the same security over and over again.
