I used to just take every job that seemed relatively appealing. But now I take a job and it’s in the trades the next day – it feels like people are watching and waiting to see what you do, and when you do take a job, attention is noted.
As a child, acting just seemed like a natural extension of my love of play – and if you’ve forgotten how to play, you shouldn’t be an actor.
Up to his twenty-sixth year, the heart of Ignatius was enthralled by the vanities of the world. His special delight was in the military life, and he seemed led by a strong and empty desire of gaining for himself a great name.
When I’m writing the book I’m laughing at just how overblown the characters seemed. How full of himself he seems. But I didn’t get far enough in the series to really drive the joke of it home.
I went to about one frat party a year. A year seemed to be enough time for me to forget how much I didn’t like frat parties, and my friends would eventually convince me to go to one. Cheap beer, guys looking for a quick hook-up, and girls playing ‘dumb’ to get in on the hook-up. I just never got into it.
As I started to think about how I can claim feminism while also acknowledging my humanity and my imperfections, ‘bad feminism’ simply seemed like the best answer.
I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
When I was a child, life felt so slow because all I wanted to do was get into show business. Each day seemed like a year, but when you get older, years pass like minutes. I wish there was a tape recorder where we could just slow our lives down.
Finally Germany’s attack on Russia seemed to confirm that Russia was not shirking and was prepared to carry out a foreign policy with the risk of war with Germany.
Comedy is the slave of time. What seemed funny then is unlikely to seem funny now, just as what strikes us as funny now would not have seemed funny then.
It always seemed to me ironic that the McCain campaign kept referring sneeringly to Obama’s meager resume – ‘a mere community organizer!’ – before he entered electoral politics. It was Obama’s experience as a community organizer that proved such a killer app when he applied that skill to the Internet.
In the ’50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay – it didn’t feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.
I could do exploration in this particular career field, and it was a goal that, even if I didn’t reach it, it was so high it seemed almost impossible, but even if I didn’t reach it, I would still have a good time and a very satisfying career.
The longer we were in it, the smaller it seemed to get.
First, I’d become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago.
For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.
I’ve never known anyone who was what he or she seemed; or at least, was only what he or she seemed. People carry worlds within them.
I did not want to reject religion as nonsense because life seemed to have no ultimate purpose without it, and most of the good people I knew were Christians.
My Southern heritage is a big part of who I am. I grew up around people who seemed like characters but are actual, real people. My grandmother made sure I had manners and all that stuff.
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.
At the beginning of my career, as a boy from Peru in London, suddenly discovering British culture and society, I looked so much at the work of the photographers Cecil Beaton and Norman Parkinson, which seemed to represent a wonderful vanished grandeur of my new country.
When I started learning the cello, I fell in love with the instrument because it seemed like a voice – my voice.
Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.
I was a new devotee of Eastern mysticism and even though I did not join that particular group, I could well have done. They seemed a bit extreme but I regarded myself as not quite ready.
I grew up in the 90s in the time of grunge when if you didn’t go on stage in jeans and a T shirt you weren’t ‘real.’ That seemed ridiculous to me.
What’s funny is that the idea of popularity – even the use of the word ‘popular’ – is something that had been mostly absent from my life since junior high. In fact, the hallmark of life after junior high seemed to be the shedding of popularity as a central concern.
There are men and women still on the streets, and that’s all they are saying Can you spare a quarter? I come from a crowd of people who were current on the outlook on life, who were social and knew where they were and had some input into how things seemed to be.
When I got to college, acting suddenly seemed like a very risky proposition and all my friends were going to law school or med school or Wall Street.
Communism seemed to be an ideal experiment in trying to achieve a state where all persons have greater democracy. I might add, like other persons here and elsewhere, I found myself concerned with the problem of increasing need for greater economic and political democracy for greater numbers of people.
My dad seemed comfortable with his decision to be a ‘have-not,’ but I knew that I wasn’t.
The idea of regretting not doing this seemed insane to me. Sitting in the corner at a bar at age 60, saying: ‘I could’ve been Bond. Buy me a drink.’ That’s the saddest place I could be. At least now at 60 I can say: ‘I was Bond. Now buy me a drink.’
I used to have a sort of soft spot for Huckabee. He seemed to have a genuinely saintly streak, which caused him to defend illegal immigrants and give pardons to criminals who were perhaps a little less rehabilitated than he had imagined.
In spite of the Depression, or maybe because of it, folks were hungry for a good time, and an evening of dancing seemed a good way to have it.
I got this idea about being afraid to let go of something and being afraid of sinking into a state of almost anesthesia, where you have to trust other people. Just the paranoia of it all. And it seemed to suit the frenetic track. So I just wrote it out and, you know, said it.
The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.
I started with Apple, in a pre-Windows era when PCs seemed to involve more of a learning curve. But the fact that I’m yet to acquire so much as a single virus still seems a very good thing.
When I was in first grade, everyone made fun of my name, of course. I think it’s kind of a big name to hold up when you’re nine years old. It seemed goofy. I used to tell people I wanted to change the world and they used to think, ‘This kid’s really weird’.
‘Look at Me’ started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That’s an abstract idea; you don’t think that’s going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.
I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.
It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as if nothing could go wrong.
It is inconceivable that even the gang who runs Russia would be willing to take on war, but one always has to remember that there seemed to be no reason in 1939 for Hitler to start war, and yet he did, and he started it with a world practically unprepared.
Yogi seemed to be doing everything wrong, yet everything came out right.
In the post-Watergate atmosphere of 1975 and 1976, the just-plain-folks personalities of both Ford and Carter seemed the perfect antidote to Nixon’s arrogant, isolated presidency. But as alert history-minded readers know, Ford and Carter were both rebuffed by voters in their efforts to hold on to the presidency.
Sometimes it seemed to me I could not look at those silent little figures; that I must go north, to the grim coal fields, to the Rocky Mountain camps, where the labor fight is at least fought by grown men.
I doubt I’ll ever do another book collaboration; I’ve been spoiled. Roger and I both happened to move to New Mexico at about the same time, when we each had a family of young kids to raise. Socializing seemed to lead naturally to working together.
Working for the Man seemed really good to me.
