When I was 49, I posed for Playboy – I was very flattered to be asked. I was quite honoured, really, considering that most of the models they feature are in their twenties.
Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don’t quite work yet is just not worth the effort for end users, however much fun it is for nerds like us.
Sometimes I don’t go into the studio for quite a while because I haven’t found enough good songs. They have to have a certain caliber and connect with me because I’m going to be playing them for the rest of my life. I start off with a circle of friends whose songs I love anyway.
I realised quite early on that, although I wasn’t trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals.
The choices we make lead up to actual experiences. It is one thing to decide to climb a mountain. It is quite another to be on top of it.
I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.
I have discovered the virtue of patience and I don’t quite believe that taking a break for good reason can be a risk.
I struggle with reading a bit. I’m slightly dyslexic, so reading takes me quite a while, and in general, I’m not a big book reader at all. And something like ‘Game of Thrones’ seems very daunting to me!
People were so keen to get investment. In those days, there was quite significant unemployment in Northern Ireland, and that had been the general pattern in Northern Ireland for many, many years.
I think of myself as somebody who, in a moment-to-moment way, I’m quite happy. But I think I am a bit doubtful and wary of true happiness, and, like a lot of my friends, there’s been a good degree of self-sabotage.
A shoe is not only a design, but it’s a part of your body language, the way you walk. The way you’re going to move is quite dictated by your shoes.
There’s a reasonable amount of traction in college education, particularly engineering, because quite a lot of that is privatized, so there is an incentive to set up new colleges of reasonably high quality.
What strikes me as most significant is that young people everywhere in India are anxious to do something. But I have also felt they are not quite clear in their mind as to what they should do.
I love video games. I’m also slightly in awe of them. I’m in awe of their power in terms of imagination, in terms of technology, in terms of concept. But I think, above all, I’m in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we’ve ever invented has quite done before.
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.’
I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It’s quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.
If African film makers had one-tenth the amount commanded by film makers the world over – even the amount used by so-called shoestring film makers – I think we would see quite an explosion of African films on the world scene.
My dad was working abroad, in Iraq, and he was a doctor. We used to go and visit him, in Baghdad, off and on. For the first ten years of my life, we used to go backwards and forwards to Baghdad, so that was quite amazing. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East.
I was never consciously rebellious but I suppose comedy is a sort of act of rebellion isnt it? Coming from a quite liberal background, it never occurred to me that there was anything to rebel against because you were allowed to say what you wanted to say.
I used to be indecisive but now I am not quite sure.
If you wait for customers to tell you that you need to do something, you’re too late. Good business leaders should be half a step ahead of what customers want, i.e. they don’t actually quite know they want it. That’s what innovation’s about. With Plan A, we didn’t wait for the consumers to tell us.
The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it – oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.
I am only satisfied insofar as I feel ‘Broadway Boogie Woogie’ is a definite progress, but even about this picture I am not quite satisfied. There is still too much of the old in it.
From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.
Some of the cases which have come to light of employers being disciplined or sacked for simply trying to talk about their faith in the workplace I find quite extraordinary. The sanitisation will lead to people of faith excluding themselves from the public space and being excluded.
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist ‘explanations’ for our mysterious human existence simply won’t do – on an intellectual level.
The main difference in the effectiveness of teaching comes from the thoughts the teacher has had during the entire time of his or her existence and brings into the classroom. A teacher concerned with developing humans affects the students quite differently from a teacher who never thinks about such things.
Time sometimes passes quite quickly.
I love the sensation of being out in the open air, far away from all the distractions of modern life. I will usually disappear for a couple of hours, and that time on my bike is quite sacred, as it’s when I do all my serious thinking. Sometimes I will stop off at bikers’ cafe and have a bacon sandwich.
By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances.
I just want to prove that I am really good at something. And I haven’t quite done that yet – at least not to myself. I know I could ride so much better, with more ease, with more finesse. I feel I’m nowhere near as good as I should be.
To disappear your complete self into a character is quite difficult. I’ve tried it 85 times, and I’ve succeeded two or three times.
I’m not a princess anyway so I find that quite weird to be labelled as one.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
I always come back to the gentler stuff like Simon & Garfunkel and the Fleet Foxes’ first album – that’s quite an odd one.
Furthermore, I don’t believe you have to be quite that competitive to compete effectively. Beyond a certain point, all that bearing down is self-defeating.
I spent two years in the military service, then I trudged around in repertory for quite a while. I somehow wound up at the National Theatre, though, and then I was definitely on my way.
Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. So, if they achieve human level intelligence or, quite possibly, greater than human levels of intelligence, this could be the seeds of hope for our future.
There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different – from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.
Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it.
Confronting a stadium audience, you can’t see the whites of their eyes. It’s just an amorphous mass of noise and, of course, you can’t see the alleged billions watching at home either, so the degree to which you are intimidated is quite low.
The way my brain processes information is quite odd. I mean, I have Attention Deficit Disorder and another learning disability I can’t even spell. I don’t even have a high school diploma. I’m smart, but you can’t prove it on paper.
I remember thinking quite logically that I didn’t want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.
Contrary to rumor, sometimes I can be quite a laugh.
You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there’s always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.
The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.
Being in the audience actually looks like quite a lot of fun.
Here’s a nation, one of the founding pillars was freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And yet, we have imposed upon people restrictions on what they can say, on what they can think. And the media is the largest proponent of this, crucifying people who say things really quite innocently.
