So I did ‘Something Happened on the Way to Heaven’ and the original version is a ballad. The original Phil record is uptempo but we slowed it down and made it a ballad.
A lot has happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war, and it’s been tested by recession and all manner of challenges – I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your president, to tell you I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before.
Since I was five or six years old, I just wanted to be a professional football player. I wanted to play against the best players. I wanted to play in big stadiums in front of big crowds, and I was desperate to play for my country one day, and thankfully, I was lucky enough that happened.
I was diagnosed a number of years ago with obsessive-compulsive disorder – which everyone has, to some degree – and I have this really annoying trait where in conversation, I always steer it back to something that happened to me.
A great thing of getting older is coming to terms and saying sorry and trying to repair damage that happened in the past.
No matter what has happened, you too have the power to enjoy yourself.
Lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that’s happened to us?
I now believe in love at first sight. Especially after it’s happened to me.
Hatta always gave the impression of rain. If I was in a real good mood and full of ideas and then happened to encounter Hatta, I felt I was suddenly surprised by a shower of rain and got wet all over the body. My good mood was gone, and also my ideas.
When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’
At least I’m at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it’s done, it’s published. I won’t write another book on Vietnam.
I prepared my intervention the night before I spoke. As it happened, there were about 44 cardinals who wished to speak but could not because there was not enough time. I was one of the last to speak.
People that have had genuine abduction experiences that I’ve met that seem very genuine to me, but they’re just confused about why it happened. I’ve met a lot of people like which I regard as being very genuine… but there’s a lot of crazy people out there.
I’d been out to a lot of people since 19. I wish to God it had happened then. I don’t think I would have the same career – my ego might not have been satisfied in some areas – but I think I would have been a happier man.
The worst thing that happened to me as a child was seeing my brother get pushed into a cement mixer.
We cannot turn the clock back nor can we undo the harm caused, but we have the power to determine the future and to ensure that what happened never happens again.
I have always liked coming home and sharing what has happened that day with my loved ones. I like comparing notes. I know other people do, too. I think there is a human instinct to tell stories, no matter who you are or where you live.
What happened to the Bush Administration regarding terrorism is that they regarded it as a secondary issue, and associated with Clinton. One of those Clinton issues.
During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake. One of them was the National Republican Convention in San Francisco, which produced the greatest disaster the Republican Party has ever known – Nominee Barry Goldwater.
I think ‘Dilbert’ will remain popular as long as employees are frustrated and they fear the consequences of complaining too loudly. ‘Dilbert’ is the designated voice of discontent for the workplace. I never planned it that way. It just happened.
Always behave as if nothing had happened, no matter what has happened.
Mr. Bachchan is one of the best things to have happened in my life. The best teacher, the best guru.
There is no ‘Bat Out of Hell III.’ That should have never happened. To me, that record is nonexistent. It doesn’t exist.
Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience.
You can only predict things after they have happened.
I’m the same kind of guy before all this happened.
What has happened to the good old-fashioned travel agent? I want to go to a really posh travel agent and have them organise everything for me. I don’t want to do things on the Internet.
I don’t think Hank Greenberg thought of himself as the first Jewish baseball player – he was a baseball player who happened to be Jewish. I’m an artist who happens to be Latin.
Dubai was a property bubble. Plain and simple. Go to Dubai and see what happened. It was… what I call it the ‘Edifice complex’ – it’s just, we can grow by putting up lots and lots of buildings and trying to attract people to come here, stay here, and put up offices here and sooner or later, you put up too many.
What happened on September 11 compels us to focus on who we are as Americans, what we stand for, what really matters in our lives – family, friends, faith and freedom.
My whole life has been decided by fate. I’ve never planned anything that’s happened to me.
Fatherhood is the best thing that has happened to me.
I love catching a snapshot of something that is just about to happen. Or maybe something that just happened, you know. But I like especially that just-before kind of feeling.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
In Rwanda that genocide happened because the international community and the Security Council refused to give, again, another 5000 troops which would have cost, I don’t know, maybe fifty, a hundred, million dollars.
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
Personally, I like reading adventures which really have happened to people, because they show what kind of things might happen to oneself, and they teach one how to ‘Be Prepared’ to meet them.
‘Before I Ever Met You’ was the first one to come out and that just dives into the grit, and it’s pretty graphic about a relationship. For my first song, it was very special the way it happened, because I didn’t really hold anything back, and people responded to it.
People can’t imagine an enemy that would cut someone’s head off before a video camera and spread it out across the world. But that has happened with the kind of enemy we are now facing.
Over the years, more than one reviewer has described my fantasy series, ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’, as historical fiction about history that never happened, flavoured with a dash of sorcery and spiced with dragons. I take that as a compliment.
Never be afraid to ask when you don’t understand. It sounds like a little thing, but awful things have happened, international incidents have flared, and markets have collapsed just because people couldn’t make sense of what was being said. They didn’t ask ‘why?’ because they thought it would make them look stupid.
In today’s time, writing stuff that actually happened is touch-and-go, because you don’t want to be too personal. If you are, then it probably won’t relate to a mass audience. A lot of times you have to make it sound like it’s about everybody else, but you really went through it.
I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t been able to hear.
I was part of integrating the public swimming pool in the 1960s. A group of us decided one day we were going to go swimming. Nothing happened. No resistance. We just went and jumped in.
Actually I don’t remember being born, it must have happened during one of my black outs.
After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.
I went from being totally unknown and never acting professionally to being in a major movie and being very famous. It all happened so quickly, I didn’t have any time to work things out. It’s been pretty scary at times.
I am not driven by any bitterness by what happened in Athens. I learnt a lot of lessons from it and probably came through it a stronger person in the end. There have been a lot of near misses, and that’s taught me to keep persevering and that there is a chance it can come right.
At the heart of ‘The Famished Road’ is a philosophical conundrum – for me, an essential one: what is reality? Everybody’s reality is subjective; it’s conditioned by upbringing, ideas, temperament, religion, what’s happened to you.
Sometimes I lie awake at night and ask why me? Then a voice answers nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.
Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we’ve had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive about social thinking is ‘how to get along and mutually cope.’
