It seemed to me that I could write commercial fiction. I wasn’t sure whether I could, or whether I wanted to write serious fiction at that point. So I said, ‘Let me try something else,’ and I wrote a mystery – but I didn’t know much about it.
With Akismet there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective? It seemed more people would be helped by blocking spam.
With the violin, for example, one understands culturally that the sound comes from the instrument that can be seen. With electronic music, it is not the same at all. That’s why it seemed so important to me, from the beginning of my career, to invent a grammar, a visual vocabulary adapted to electronic music.
I was always frightened by taverns. They just seemed like very unpleasant places to go.
My manager said it would more effective against left-handed hitters. It seemed to me that was impossible to do without the high leg kick, which I started that day.
Coming from a farming background, I saw nothing out of the ordinary in running barefoot, although it seemed to startle the rest of the athletics world. I have always enjoyed going barefoot and when I was growing up I seldom wore shoes, even when I went into town.
School and I never seemed to walk hand in hand.
For months it seemed that a revolution was certain. But instead, slavery seems more likely now. The working class no longer has the physical resistance for a revolution, and the Entente is too strong, and Russia is too weak.
‘Anthems’ was a harsh indictment of American foreign policy; the video for the first single featured an American flag engulfed in a pool of oil, imagery which might have been risque in 2002, but seemed unimaginably passe in the last year of Bush’s presidency.
The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible – the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets.
When I was a kid in the ’50s, during the Eisenhower years, everything seemed to be working fine. I don’t recall as a teenager ever worrying about the state of the future world.
I was actually very hesitant to write about Marie Antoinette. She seemed at first glance – well, I cannot think of any other term – an airhead of the first degree.
I’d always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.
I had little problems during high school. It seemed like I was always getting into trouble in summer, going in and out of juvenile hall.
These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.
The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeleton of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.
The acting bug just seemed to stick with me. I loved going to theatre school in college and continued to train in film classes and had been auditioning for T.V. and movie roles since I was in my late teens. My career has been slow and steady, and I kind of like it that way.
Westminster Abbey, the Tower, a steeple, one church, and then another, presented themselves to our view; and we could now plainly distinguish the high round chimneys on the tops of the houses, which yet seemed to us to form an innumerable number of smaller spires, or steeples.
I learned American Sign Language in college and seemed to pick it up rather quickly. I really love to sign and wish that I had more friends to sign with.
The think that we hung the film version all on was ‘Hedwig’ on tour. On stage, it’s one theatre, one show. It just seemed natural to change it. In the film, we were able to go to flashback rather than have her talk to the audience. And we had the play to practice and to see where we had made mistakes.
I’m a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.
The scientists at the end of the 19th century had people coming to them with this weird behaviour, and they didn’t know what was going on but there seemed to be a similarity. They needed an answer, so they made up one.
Youth is seen as everything. You don’t know anything when you’re young. It’s great being older, just having a more balanced perspective. I wake up and realise that what seemed to be important last year no longer is. I’m increasingly grateful for every day.
Boulez seemed to me to be a guy who wrote laws. Like a company lawyer.
As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn’t find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.
My first job, which I had to take when not more than fifteen, was assistant to a fruit peddler. It seemed all right to me until a little girl told me snootily, ‘We never deal with peddler!’ Thereupon I resigned, ashamed of what I was doing.
Well I think that’s probably one of a few, where I grew up in the City of New York, it’s got a lot of energy, my parents are Irish-American so there was a bit of yelling going on in my house but it seemed normal.
I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not… well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre.
These were the moments when I was disappointed and frustrated, when I got so low because it seemed all my hard work had been wasted. But the moments passed, and the motivation to go back to rehab was there again.
For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.
I always liked Casey Stengel as a manager because he seemed to have a grasp of so many things.
When I had my first boy it all started and that male energy seemed to keep me awake but since my daughter, who’s incredibly serene, I can’t seem to stop sleeping because she’s asleep all the time. It’s a pattern.
My tenure at ‘The Daily Show’ started during the decade after September 11, and fear of Muslims was at an all-time high. Politicians and the media seemed to dial the fright, mistrust, and animosity up to a fever pitch to gain votes and ratings.
I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.
I can remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s how many men with AIDS I saw everywhere in Key West. There were hospices and medical supply stores geared to people with AIDS. It seemed that every sick man who could afford it had headed for the warmth and the tranquillity and the gay-friendliness of the island.
A doctrine of class war seemed to provide a solution to the problem of poverty to people who know nothing about how wealth is created.
I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them.
I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.
Puppies, like all babies, grow up fast. Before long, Gracie was no longer barking at her reflection, instead offering a blase look that seemed to say, ‘I know what that is now. I know it’s not another dog.’
I never wanted to go to university: books seemed to have all the answers, and the questions, too. I went to work for Jean Muir as her in-house model. Miss Muir – as she will always be to me – was interested in everything.
Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal.
It just seemed too weird to me. I don’t know, maybe they were smoking a joint in the car downstairs from their parents’ apartment. I had to go that far to put together a scenario of how they could have possibly recognized me.
When I was a kid, for me, the ’60s seemed so far away. But I was actually born in the late ’60s.
Darwin recognized the fact that paleontology then seemed to provide evidence against rather for evolution in general or the gradual origin of taxonomic categories in particular.
We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now.
I seemed to vow to myself that some day I would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till I came to one of the poles of the earth, the end of the axis upon which this great round ball turns.
The role seemed to demand that I keep myself worked up to fever pitch, so I took on the actual attributes of the horrible vampire, Dracula.
I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was… nothingness.
