None of us suddenly becomes something overnight. The preparations have been in the making for lifetime.
I started reading about people of great accomplishment… and it dawned on me suddenly that the person who has the most to do with what happens in your life is you.
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it’s not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
I remember one day sitting at the pool and suddenly the tears were streaming down my cheeks. Why was I so unhappy? I had success. I had security. But it wasn’t enough. I was exploding inside.
We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet – I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world.
When I was an actor, I worked with lots of men who had a bit of success early on, who were very good looking, who suddenly made a bit of money and who felt no embarrassment – and nor should they have done – about having a good time.
Suddenly a mist fell from my eyes and I knew the way I had to take.
I have stayed true to that first idea that people can have a day in their lives that is very important and if they can reconnect with that day, reconnect with the people they were then, they can suddenly revive their emotions.
Time, which runs through the world like an endless tinsel thread, seemed to pass through the centre of this room and through the centre of these people and suddenly to pause and petrify, stiff, still and glittering… and the objects in the room drew a little closer together.
The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when ‘The Washington Post’ suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious.
A lot of men in politics suddenly woke up to the issue of women in politics when they realised: hey, there are votes in this!
I started to have these ideas for films. They were like running images in my head. But I didn’t think I could be a director. I just literally didn’t think it was a possibility. Then I started to suddenly see films of women.
As you get older it’s more confusing. Suddenly, there’s more pressure to fit in to your assigned gender.
By living so long, the supercentenarian earns the prefixal ‘super’ and becomes a person suddenly freighted with power and meaning. He’s Gandalf, Yoda, the Ancient Mariner, perhaps with some otherworldly insight. He’s lived so long that, in fact, he’s living the afterlife to his own initial life.
It’s suddenly practical to do very high quality video wirelessly over mobile devices, and we’re just in the early days of that.
I still am in touch with several friends from high school. I don’t go to reunions much. I’m afraid that if I go back to the school, they’ll suddenly go, ‘You know what? We’ve checked the records and you still have one more French class. Get back in here.’
For years that may mean imitation. Then, one day, it is like a door opening, and a new thought comes in. Why not try this instead. Suddenly he is doing something original, almost in spite of himself.
I hadn’t done comedy before ‘Fresh Meat’ – I hadn’t really been seen that way, and then ‘Fresh Meat’ came out, and suddenly a lot more comedy scripts were coming my way, which was really great.
I used to tweet, but it’s an act of futility. You’re not really making any impact, and if you find yourself in a mood when you wanna be a bit controversial and you post something, you suddenly realise, ‘Oh my God!’ because you’ve opened yourself up to a bunch of criticism from strangers.
What happens when an industry transitions from using one or more ‘smart’ and centralized networks to using a common, decentralized, open, and dumb network? A tsunami of innovation that was pent up for decades is suddenly released.
When you’re in love, you’ve found your soul mate, you think life is going one way, and suddenly it’s completely apparent it’s not. You have to rethink your whole purpose.
Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.
When I wrote ‘The Good Body,’ I turned 40 and suddenly had this stomach. It seemed like the end of the world. Because I didn’t value my body. I was constantly judging it, but I also didn’t live in it.
My very best friend died in a car accident when I was 16 years old. That was the hardest blow emotionally that I have ever had to endure. Suddenly, you realize tomorrow might not come. Now I live by the motto, ‘Today is what I have.’
I’ve always thought like I’m really a 3-feet-high comic trapped in a leading man’s body… but then I played Nicholas Nickleby, and suddenly I was heroic.
As London is suddenly promoted as a super-wealth brand, the England outside London shivers beneath cutbacks, tight circumstances and economic disasters.
Until the Nineteen-Eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated the area as China’s first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; factories sprang up, often housed in hastily constructed tower blocks.
It’s a lethal thing to suddenly raise taxes.
But I also think that it does create a lot of revenue, but to me it’s a temporary revenue stream because it’s an industry that, if suddenly gambling started in Massachusetts, then a lot of our patrons who would gamble in New Hampshire if we had it, would disappear.
There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.
So, suddenly I was an actor. I don’t remember being nervous. I learned to be nervous later.
By all means, let’s have free trade and no trade barriers and a common market. But where did it all suddenly become about our own economic and political destiny being surrendered to Brussels with agendas that arguably have very little to do with the interests of the British people and British voters?
It was like falling off a building and suddenly, bang, you hit the bottom. The first time it happened was on an ordinary day at home. I was taking down some curtains. I took one step, turned around, took another step and then I fell and hit my head hard on the rowing machine.
At Juilliard, suddenly I was reading these great plays that could articulate the ways I was feeling in the Marine Corps, and that felt very therapeutic, by putting words to feelings, in a big way.
There’s a perceived inverse relation between looks and talent. Look at Charlize Theron – she made herself ugly for ‘Monster’ and suddenly everyone said ‘she’s a genius.’ It shouldn’t be like that.
Friendships, in general, are suddenly contracted; and therefore it is no wonder they are easily dissolved.
When Michael Jordan quit, I suddenly found myself without a sports hero.
I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal’s point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.
The invention of the iPod changes how you use music. Suddenly you have music everywhere.
I think if they suddenly cut away and you realize there is a stunt guy, you’re out of the movie.
And in the middle of one of those scenes, I suddenly felt my heart just open: it was overwhelming, to the point where I got teary-eyed. Never would I have thought anything like that could happen in a love scene.
Suddenly I could control every aspect of publishing, and it was incredibly empowering! I didn’t have to sit by the phone any longer waiting for things to happen because I was the one making them happen. That’s why I decided to start Amber House Books.
The no-secrets era of social media makes one consider the built-in risk factor of nominating high-testosterone men to positions of power at all. Everyone is under too much scrutiny now to take a chance on candidates who suddenly blow up into a comic meme, a punchline, a ribald hashtag.
I know I’m supposed to say ageing doesn’t bother me, then suddenly you’re like, ‘Yeah, I care about it, I really worry about it. I’m getting old. I’m old!’
I had no words for these feelings. And then people started using the word Ms. Suddenly, there was this handle with which I could identify myself and understand why I felt so out of whack with the culture around me.
Sometimes when I write songs, I don’t know what they’re about, and it just suddenly comes to me.
As for writing novels – it’s what I’ve done for 30 some-odd years. I can’t suddenly say I’m going to take up golf. I need something in my life. As long as I can write a coherent sentence, I’ll keep at it.
You can be cocky and confident, but when you start developing feelings for someone, suddenly your self-esteem drops a bit.
I’ve been quite a late developer on the clothes front, but I’ve suddenly realised it is one of life’s joys.
Some actors go, ‘Bing!’ and suddenly they’re being paid huge sums. Me, I seem to get screwed every time.
A career in journalism suddenly lost its appeal.
The idea of the peace movement and of people who spent their entire lives trying to have a more egalitarian, just society, suddenly became swamped by the record industry, by the new rock and roll culture, and by the idea of not trusting anyone over thirty.
