The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God’s sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.
There was one issue on which there seemed to be almost unanimity: the Internet should not be managed by any government, national or multinational.
In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and said exactly what she thought. Everyone’s eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping, and I really enjoyed that.
When I first arrived in Houston, I was fascinated with the elaborate styles of cowboy boots and thought they were incredibly exotic. They also seemed to be a central part of a specifically ‘Texan’ identity, one distinct from being ‘American.’
Advertising seemed almost natural to me because it was a business where you had to inform, persuade and educate. And so from being a junior copywriter to being the creative director of one of the largest advertising agencies in the country took me 4.5 years, which is, well, a fairly spectacular rise.
The moment seemed right to me for a full and, if possible, authoritative portrait of the life and character of the Prince of Wales.
It was only through getting interested in more out-there and avant-garde forms that the musical suddenly seemed like such a wonderful genre to me.
When you are 20, 40 looks really old. When I was nearing 30, that seemed like a major milestone.
I do remember meeting ‘The Donald.’ He seemed to really enjoy the WrestleMania 4 battle royal. He watched me take a very hard front turnbuckle bump, and it seemed to stun him that I wasn’t seriously hurt. Backstage, Trump gave me a big smile and a handshake.
There wasn’t much for me to do after school except the drama club, so when I kind of started doing drama club, it seemed to be something I could do.
I was writing a script about the Joker menacing a regular person who had strayed into his path, and I needed to give him a gang of henchmen to work with him. The idea occurred to me, let’s put in a female henchperson, because that seemed like a fun variation on the regular big thug guys.
Like most ghetto kids I knew it was important to be ‘somebody’ so I became a good soccer player, because excelling at a sport seemed to make you special.
From the time I was a kid, I was crazy about anything having to do with the West. I’d look at all of these photos of Montana, and they all seemed so magical and majestic. I just wanted to go west, and I finally did it when I was barely 21. I went off to volunteer at a Navajo reservation in New Mexico.
I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.
When I was younger, I talked to the adults around me that I respected most about how they got where they were, and none of them plotted a course they could have predicted, so it seemed a waste of time to plan too long-term. Since then, I’ve always gone on my instincts.
If I had permitted my failures, or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success, to discourage me I cannot see any way in which I would ever have made progress.
I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening – the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us – seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent.
Of course there will be disappointments and the way will not always be as I expected it. But if it seemed easy, then that would be the time to worry that I am on the wrong path.
I was in college, and very disappointed. I majored in commercial art and interior design for three or four years. At that time, it seemed the thing I really wanted to do, production design, just wasn’t available in the U.K., so I turned to music.
All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.
I came to political consciousness with John F. Kennedy’s magnificent 1961 Inaugural Address. It seemed the start of something fresh and exciting, and it was.
I came into a strong organization, and I hope I strengthened it more and expanded its capacity to deal with some of the challenges that might not have seemed as great 10 years ago, such as H.I.V., AIDS and children affected by war.
The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was ‘high-strung’ – intensely neurotic – yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.
I didn’t go to graduate school, where all the important writers seemed to be getting their start. I didn’t pursue getting published in literary magazines. I didn’t even send out countless pitch letters and manuscripts to agents.
My mum gave me pretty good genes in that department. She had gorgeous skin. That good English complexion. She never seemed to have a blemish that I knew of.
I went with agnosticism for a long, long time because I just hated to say I was an atheist – being an atheist seemed so rigid. But the more I became comfortable with the word, and the more I read, it started to stick.
I’d always wanted to be on Broadway one day, but it seemed like a dream that might be unattainable. This business has a lot of ups and downs and I learned that pretty quickly.
I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.
That’s one of the great gifts of this, the greatest of all games, baseball: it allows you, still, to lose yourself in a dream, to feel and remember a season of life when summer never seemed to die and the assault of cynicism hadn’t begun to batter optimism.
We in Britain stopped evolving gastronomically with the advent of the pie. Everything beyond that seemed like a brave, frightening new world. We knew the French were up to something across the Channel, but we didn’t want anything to do with it.
Too often, the idea seemed to be that the cost of being part of Europe was being less like Britain. So after years of fighting to defend Europe against attacks from the Eurosceptic right, it would be fatal to retreat into the same arguments and begin the battle anew.
Every time I got close, somebody seemed to play a little better.
Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me – how really tenuous our sanity is.
The call that always seemed the toughest to me was the slide and tag play at second. You can see it coming, but you don’t know which way the runner is going to slide, where the throw is going to be, and how the fielder is going to take the throw.
I grew up loving actresses or actors who were very classy but who seemed a little bit mysterious because you couldn’t grasp what they’re really thinking.
It’s always seemed odd to me that after a group of terrorists commits a vile and odious deed they rush messages to the public to claim credit for it.
I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.
Before replays, football telecasts were filled with dead spots… It really destroyed the momentum of the telecasts. Replays gave you something to show during the pauses. It seemed to make the game go faster.
Once I’d chosen the songs, it seemed like it would just be a question then of recording them. But it’s a case of trying to re-invent the songs; taking them in different directions.
I always seemed to fall in love with policemen.
Yet in all those cases I finally steeled myself to seize the opportunity, and find a way to muddle through and eventually conclude that I had, in fact, chosen the right path, as risky as it seemed at the time.
Everything that could produce a clash between the Arab world and the West seemed dangerous to me.
One thing that used to worry me is the fact that it seemed like Harvard was this big scary thing where I would have to spend all my time studying just to get in. But getting to go to both campuses of Harvard and Oxford and getting to meet some of the professors was absolutely amazing.
Randy Newman seemed like an even worse singer than me. I liked Ray Charles, Levi Stubbs, Jack Jones, Joe Tex, Wilson Pickett.
It seemed impossible that a scrappy book like ‘Goon Squad’ could win an award like that. It’s such an iconic honor. I think what the Pulitzer means to me is that I’ll need to work very, very hard to try to live up to it.
My parents wanted me to be a teacher. Because I could work most of the year and pursue the things that I love to do during the summer. It just seemed like a good plan.
I had a hard time at Chelsea mainly because I was injured much of the time. Every time I recovered from one injury I seemed to get a new one and it set me back again.
