My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.
I grew up during the Cold War, when everything seemed very tenuous. For many years, right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had vivid nightmares of nuclear apocalypse.
Compared to being caught in the wrong body, being plagued by ‘dysmorphic OCD thoughts,’ being gay is commonplace and mostly accepted. What once seemed unimaginable and shameful has been revealed to be perfectly normal.
When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make.
The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren’t any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.
I didn’t train to make the Olympic team until 1968. I simply trained for the moment. I never even imagined I would be an Olympic athlete. It always seemed to evolve.
I never went to a drama school or anything. I just gave it my best shot, and everyone seemed to like it, so I carried on doing it.
I didn’t really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.
What they were giving me seemed incredibly real to me, so I’d react to it in a very real way. That was frightening for me, especially because of the subject.
I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.
Odd, the years it took to learn one simple fact: that the prize just ahead, the next job, publication, love affair, marriage always seemed to hold the key to satisfaction but never, in the longer run, sufficed.
The people of western Missouri are, in some respects, very peculiar. We will take Jackson county where I was born for instance. In that section the people seemed to be born fighters, the instinct being inherited from a long line of ancestors.
I’m not a trained chef. I’m a self-taught cook, and I want people to be like, ‘Yo, I could do that! Maybe I didn’t think to or maybe it seemed harder than it really is.’
Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
I remember very vividly, as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they’re still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us.
For a change, lady luck seemed to be smiling on me. Then again, maybe the fickle wench was just lulling me into a false sense of security while she reached for a rock.
It seemed sensible to move to a market town where I could walk everywhere.
Everything about my life seemed so perfect to people. But I struggle like everyone else.
It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.
I knew I wanted to be an actor, and my mother said, ‘Call Aaron Sorkin.’ It seemed dubious that I’d make it as an actor by calling Jews I knew, but it worked.
The Mole had long wanted to make the I acquaintance of the Badger. He seemed, by all accounts, to be such an important personage and, though rarely visible, to make his unseen influence felt by everybody about the place.
I always felt that sci-fi and fantasy were my thing. Bit of a geek, I’m afraid. But I like creating worlds, and I felt it was a genre that gave me more freedom. It just seemed like I belonged there.
Growing up, dating seemed pretty straightforward: If someone was interested in getting to know you on a romantic level, they approached, exchanged info, and proceeded to communicate with you in a consistent fashion between outings of various natures.
Since that first showing of Foolish Wives I have seemed to walk through vast crowds of people, their white American faces turned towards me in stern reproof.
I seemed to belong to three countries: I had an apartment in Paris, a house in Hollywood, and when I married British theater director Peter Hall, I moved to London.
But the experience that I had, which was basically just feeling loved and taken care of in a room full of thousands of people I didn’t know, seemed to be a pretty strong sign that what I was doing was a good thing.
My first job was a Greek tragedy, and ever since, one job just seemed to roll onto the next. I’ve been terribly lucky.
I started training with school friends and, one by one, they all dropped out. When we became teenagers, it seemed more exciting to go shopping at weekends. My mum told me not to worry about what my friends were doing and to stick at it.
I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.
One day, I was playing ‘The Game of Life,’ the board game, with a mess of kids, and I wasn’t quite sure how, but it seemed different than the game I remembered playing as a kid. So I bought an old game, from 1960, and it was different.
I sat out a few years because I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it seemed like a good time to step back.
With ‘Kidnapped,’ there didn’t seem to be a sure hand guiding it: everything had to be run-up-the-pole, so to speak, and there seemed to be a large committee, every day fighting about what the show was about.
It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.
Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.
This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.
I liked a lot of the things other people liked – Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Van Halen, AC/DC – but if I compared it to my dad’s music, there just seemed to be elements missing.
I’m one of the most optimistic persons in the world. I always believed that – there’s another shot, another chance. In boxing, I never gave up. I kept trying, kept trying. Even when things seemed so dim, I continued to push forward to make something happen in my favor.
When I was 3 or 4, I seemed to be bursting with music. They played Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra in the house, so I learned my vocabulary from song lyrics – I was literally singing before I was talking.
I was never very good at exams, having a poor memory and finding the examination process rather artificial, and there never seemed to be enough time to follow up things that really interested me.
I deliver very traditionally, and people aren’t threatened. I think if I cursed or seemed wilder, I couldn’t get away with the amount of very opinionated politics I get away with.
I wanted the influence. In the end I wasn’t very good at being a president. I looked out of the window and thought that the man cutting the lawn actually seemed to have more control over what he was doing.
I don’t care about age very much. I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.
I always wrote. My parents are writers. It just seemed like something people did.
I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.
When I was young, I kept a diary for about 10 years and I had to write in it every day. Even on days when nothing seemed to happen, I made myself think of something to put in it.
Well, you know, I mean, I first did my live shows in the late 70’s and in those days I had a boatload of equipment that always seemed to be going wrong.
I am waiting for the right story to tell. Just like ‘Man of Tai Chi’ just seemed to be the right story to tell. So I’m looking for that. Because I really love directing. I love developing the story. I love actors. I love the cinema of it, the way that you tell a story visually.
In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.
Barry White seemed so filled with self-parody at first that it was easy to dismiss him. But it is becoming increasingly obvious with every additional release that he is a very talented man.
It seemed to be inadmissible to give in on such a fundamental point. This would have meant that any one who would have wanted to be a terrorist could gain eventually their freedom thanks to another kidnapping.
Growing up, Paul Newman seemed like the ultimate manly actor. And then, I got to work with him and we became friends, so that was nice.
