I think we present extreme aspects of human behavior and hopefully get at times, messages across or bring issues to the table or as we so often say, shed light into the dark crevices of human nature.
I don’t care where you went to school. There – have I made your day? No? All right, I’ll go further: I also don’t care what your dad did for a living or how your mum voted. Nor do I mind whether you ate your tea in front of the telly, dinner at the kitchen table, or supper in the dining room.
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
No matter what message you are about to deliver somewhere, whether it is holding out a hand of friendship, or making clear that you disapprove of something, is the fact that the person sitting across the table is a human being, so the goal is to always establish common ground.
Politicians are nauseating by definition… They can produce nothing, neither a loaf of bread nor a table nor a picture; and this inability to create value, this total inferiority, makes them jealous, vengeful, insolent and a menace to life and limb.
I never, ever want to be in a position where people are sitting round a table, saying, ‘We’ve got this book. I don’t really get it, but we paid for it, so we’ve got to sell it.’ I’m not Tony Parsons; that’s not right for me.
If I am more fortunate than others I need to build a longer table not a taller fence.
I’m a bit of an attention seeker, so I’m always looking for a table or some height to get up on and dance.
With computer science, I had to go through that uncomfortable process of my brain establishing a hash table, if you will – the coders will get that – for this new information, because I didn’t have one. So I had to establish a brand-new file system from scratch.
With food, you’re the artist; you put the colour in it, you present it to the table and it has the ability to knock out the senses. It can look fabulous, be beautifully presented and smell great and taste good as well.
Especially for fostering creative, conceptual work, the best way to use money as a motivator is to take the issue of money off the table so people concentrate on the work.
You have to understand that every negotiation isn’t about taking everything off the table. It’s cliche, but you have to try and make sure the other side feels good and you feel good. Because in my business, when I make a deal, it just means once we’re done negotiating, we have to go off and work together.
The importance of satire is bringing more people to the table. There are a lot of average citizens who aren’t interested in politics and would be more interested if it’s brought to them in a comedic, funny, satirical way.
A locked-room problem lies at the heart of my new novel, ‘In The Morning I’ll Be Gone,’ in which an RUC detective has to find out whether a publican’s daughter who fell off a table in a bar that was locked from the inside was in fact murdered.
All of my activities are so pedestrian. The extreme sport I play is ping pong. And we play it hard. If any of you suckers want to step up to the table, be ready.
There was a note on my dressing room table that said, Call Neil Young.
Many Europeans are concerned that stronger sanctions are a slippery slope toward war unless the U.S. is at the table.
All of my youth growing up in my Italian family was focused around the table. That’s where I learned about love.
Under President Barack Obama, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has been invited into the White House and given a seat at the table. Hispanics are serving in unprecedented numbers at the highest levels of this administration, including in the Cabinet.
I even smoke in bed. Imagine smoking a cigar in bed, reading a book. Next to your bed, there’s a cigar table with a special cigar ashtray, and your wife is reading a book on how to save the environment.
My memories are of my dad taking me to football on Saturday mornings, and my mum taking me swimming. Those are the things I remember from my childhood, not sitting around the table debating capitalism and the profit squeeze.
I used to drum on the table at school. I think a handful of my school reports say that they thought I might have some kind of ADD because I was making sounds. I was far from being an ADD child. I was actually quite quiet and well-behaved. But I used to drum on things.
I believe it’s time to put our best ideas on the table and work toward a bipartisan solution, with the single goal of leaving the Social Security system stronger than we found it.
I will sit at the table and compromise with anyone in the name of progress, but there are things I’m not willing to compromise and negotiate on, and that is the rights of women, of immigrants, of workers, and of the LGBTQIA community.
On ‘Idol,’ Steven Tyler will be sitting at a table with two other judges, and part of his job will be keeping his yap zipped while they talk. This makes no sense at all, since Tyler has zero yap-zipping skills.
I never cooked before I became vegan. Preparing a meal as opposed to ordering in all the time, you start thinking about where your food comes from and how it gets to your table. You notice that chain.
There should be no rules at your dinner party except for people to eat a lot and enjoy a long night where they feel like they could fall asleep at the dinner table at the end.
There have been times – and not just on ‘The Newsroom,’ but on ‘The West Wing,’ ‘Sports Night,’ ‘Studio 60’… – where it was hard to look the cast and crew in the eye, when I put a script on the table that I knew just wasn’t good enough.
If you look through history, all of the great work we’ve done in Congress has been around a table of compromise, when it comes to the most difficult problems.
If you take the approach that you want to scrape every last nickel off the table, that’ll work one or two times, but after awhile, your reputation will precede you.
2012 has been an extraordinary year for our country. We cheered our Queen to the rafters with the Jubilee, showed the world what we’re made of by staging the most spectacular Olympic and Paralympic Games ever and – let’s not forget – punched way above our weight in the medals table.
I know people that could serve me canned tuna and saltine crackers and have me feel more at home at their table than some people who can cook circles around me. The more you try to impress people, generally the less you do.
Something funny certainly happens when palladium and platinum come into contact with hydrogen gas; it’s one of the great mysteries still waiting to be solved on the periodic table. But it’s quite a leap from ‘something funny’ to cold fusion.
Leave the table while you still feel you could eat a little more.
The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.
Today, you have neuroscientists working on a genetic, behavioural or cognitive level, and then you have informaticians, chemists and mathematicians. They all have their own understanding of how the brain functions and is structured. How do you get them all around the same table?
It’s always performing for me. I write and I record so I can perform. It all ties to that. I’ve done it since I was a little kid. That’s my absolute rush, is playing for different people every night, bringing something else to the table they’ve never seen.
Before I’d written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers – when you’ve got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people’s ability to do that.
People love having a home. People love going to their house and sleeping in their bedroom and having a conversation around the dinner table. You don’t particularly think of that conversation as a private conversation; you just think of it as something that happened in your home.
Since I was a child, I’ve liked telling stories. Maybe because my father’s a director, I grew up loving stories. I’m not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.
Workers want to be paid an honest, fair wage for the work they do. They want to be able to provide for their families by being justly compensated for their part in helping grow the U.S. economy. They deserve to be able to put food on the table and receive health care and other benefits.
But by reframing the learning process and focusing on the cool end goal, the fear of failure is often taken off the table, and learning just comes more naturally.
But I believe that there are marriages where you can have your pool table and she can have her scrapbooking room or garden or whatever it is. But when everyone has what they want, it’s not funny. There’s no conflict.
Let’s say you would see me in a lot more big movies had I done movies that I’d been asked to do playing bad guys. Now that I have a child on the way, I think that you’ll probably be seeing me play more bad guys. If that’s what’s going to put bread on the table, that’s what I’m going to be doing.
I try to ground most of my characters in reality somehow. That’s kind of what I bring to the table.
