Thinking about Amazon’s restraints – the company has never tried to introduce a social network or an email service, for example – you can understand something about the future Amazon seems to envision: A time when no screen is needed at all, just your voice.
I get egotistical about things where I can do something well – for example, my singing. Most other things, I don’t have the wherewithal to back it up.
I have feared for my life on fishing trips – I was once in a plane crash in the Amazon, for example, and I’ve been trapped in a sinking boat – but not when actually handling fish, although I have been injured by fish.
I’ve had four fantastic years on ‘Strictly Come Dancing,’ but for us it’s about moving forward and the end goal is to present a shiny-floored Saturday night TV show that we all love, for example, ‘Strictly,’ ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ – those sort of shows.
I look at scripts, and sometimes I apply theory to them. For ‘Antiviral,’ for example, I was reading Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ and it was all about the psychological process by which we fetishize the female image. It’s all about scopophilia.
I love working with crews. Filming the ‘Fred’ movie, for example, was a blast. You get to be around so many creative, talented people all day, so it’s a blast.
Sensorial perception, for example, certainly occurs with greater or less accuracy according to the degree of interest; it is constantly given other directions by the change of external stimuli and by ideas.
We worked very hard to make the lyrics suit the music. I can’t, like Elton John, for example, compose by lyrics. Elton has a great talent for that. Whatever you give him, including your questions, he composes in half an hour and makes a great song out of it.
I’m 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I’d only be 48. That’s the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.
Design impacts me in everything I do. Because, as I say, everything I own is designed. So the building I live in, the objects I choose to boil water in for example, even drinking vessels.
Mental fitness is obviously important to being an astronaut, but so it physical fitness. For example, space walks are extremely physically demanding. We train for them in a giant swimming pool and we wear this suit that weighs about 300 pounds.
Look at what the Omar of Qatar is doing, for example – the King of Morocco, Jordan, Bahrain. There are reform movements taking place, efforts to broaden the political participation of the populations of the region.
A puppet, for example, is just a piece of wood, a couple of rivets, but put them together, and if you know how to do it, and the audience’s imagination joins in with this, then a miracle will come out of that machine. That is what we and the audience do in the theatre – we create miracles in that space.
I’m the sort of person – for example coming off ‘Strictly’ – I make decisions, then I just deal with them and I go with them 100 per cent.
Sometimes self-esteem affects you on and off the pitch. Until you face your next game and you miss an easy chance, for example, then you feel not as great.
I have great respect for people who live out their beliefs. For example, Ed Begley Jr. is an environmentalist, but he really lives his lives, and is he very prudent in the way he lives. He’s cautious. He’s not like an Al Gore that flies around in a private jet and burns 20,000 gallons a day on his jet.
If, for example, all the codons are triplets, then in addition to the correct reading of the message, there are two incorrect readings which we shall obtain if we do not start the grouping into sets of three at the right place.
On the RFactor model that comes with the ‘Pro-Sim,’ everything is balanced and measured. If you go up on the rear ride height, for example, it changes the airflow and the downforce of the car. You learn by trying different things, which gives you a better idea when you’re on a race weekend.
I believe the best influence you can have is not by being preachy, but by trying to live. For example, knowing you’re not perfect, but trying to treat everyone kind and accepting everyone for who they are.
For something to collapse, not all systems have to shut down. In most cases, just one system is enough. For example, the human body is a system of systems. If just one system, such as the cardiovascular system, shuts down, death follows.
I get on well with Italians. Which makes things easier when I meet, for example, my future mechanics at Ferrari.
I let my game do the talking. I’ve had incidents like that but when I compare my own story to the stories that have happened forty or fifty years ago particularly to Jackie Robinson for example.
Facial recognition, completely unmonitored, can be used for very bad things. It can be used for stalking, for example.
It would be nice if areas could be revitalised – like places in the U.S. such as Pittsburgh, for example, which have been transformed through shale. There you have shiny cars in a shiny city because of the development of shale in an old industrial heartland.
But it is true that sometimes an enveloping darkness aids one to clearer vision; as in a panorama building, for example, where the obscurity about the entrance prepares one better for the climax, and gives the scene depicted a more real and vivid appearance.
Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they’re made. So, for example, scientists didn’t go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we’re still finding things for a laser to do.
A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a ‘Dear Murph’ letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan’s father in a film.
I think the forms of terrorism are becoming very diverse, amongst them cyber-terrorism, for example.
I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.
Pretending that the fashion industry isn’t in part based on leather would be quite stupid of me, but at the same time, there is another way of doing things – even outside of leather. I don’t use PVC either, for example, because it is harmful.
Cities like New Delhi for example, where traffic is dense and it’s a more fluid driving environment, that’s hard for self-driving technology to deal with.
French cinema has always been very interesting, and it’s still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it’s great to still have a cinema that doesn’t try to emulate, for example, American cinema.
Sometimes I don’t even accept the simplest medical treatment, such as, for example, the anti-flu vaccine.
You still get these waves of doubt that come over you, for example, when you get a bad review or you accept a part and think, ‘Oh, God, what have I just accepted? I can’t do that.’ I don’t think that’s something that will ever go away in me.
And you can tell the writers who do it – Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.
You know how someone – something – surprises you. You wake up a little bit. That’s done through Chinese cuisine – for example, through dishes of artifice. That’s a whole sub-tradition in Chinese cuisine. To create a dish that comes to the table looking like one thing but actually is something else.
I’ve got friends who are so good at getting away with things, like going up to the desk to get upgraded on a plane, for example. I haven’t got any of that kind of confidence in those situations. I look so awkward. I act awkward. I’m really apologetic.
The Greek debt issue, for example, is such a threat because if that country ever defaulted, it might cause some bank that’s ‘too big to fail’ to actually fail.
A lot of folks are still demanding more evidence before they actually consider Iraq a threat. For example, France wants more evidence. And you know I’m thinking, the last time France wanted more evidence they rolled right through Paris with the German flag.
The era when the United States was the dominant global power is steadily coming to an end, and it must find a way of acknowledging this and framing its ambitions and interests accordingly. Instead of claiming the right to continuing primacy in east Asia, for example, it should seek to share that primacy with China.
I grew up in a family of peasants, and it was there that I saw the way that, for example, our wheat fields suffered as a result of dust storms, water erosion and wind erosion; I saw the effect of that on life – on human life.
Dad was an outstanding leader. He’d bring in top thinkers from a wide array of fields – how to fix the Detroit schools, for example. I watched him in these meetings. He listened and probed.
I think humanitarian organizations should acknowledge the progress more than they do. I think that one reason people are reluctant to provide more help to Africa, for example, is this sense that it’s just hopeless, in a way that I think is untrue.
