In the fall of 1968, I became attractive to women. One day I was an ignored schlub in the street, then suddenly all these good-looking women were interested in me.
I used to sleep on the floor next to the bed, because I believed that I didn’t even deserve a bed to sleep in. And then, one morning, a cockroach crawled onto my leg. I looked at it, and suddenly I awoke from a kind of hypnotic trance in which I had been all my life.
On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next.
Astronomers sometimes observe that a star of medium magnitude increases suddenly in size; a star invisible to the naked eye may become very brilliant and visible without any telescope – the appearance of a Nova.
It astonished me in the early Nineties to suddenly have musicians admit that they had been inspired and influenced by us. That meant a lot at that time. But of course, being human, the… disrespect isn’t even strong enough a word, is it? The opprobrium was painful. Being popular and hated is not satisfying.
I can read significance into tiny, tiny things. If I’d met someone 10 years ago and not seen them again, and then I suddenly bumped into them, I’d feel that that was ‘meant,’ or there’s a fate, you know?
Getting married, for me, was the best thing I ever did. I was suddenly beset with an immense sense of release, that we have something more important than our separate selves, and that is the marriage. There’s immense happiness that can come from working towards that.
When I was 20, I thought anyone in the music business over 25 is past it. Then at 30, you think anyone still doing it at 35 is ridiculous. Suddenly, you find yourself at 48 and still doing it, so I don’t know what to say, really.
Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.
I was so busy with my studies that I didn’t have a musical idol as a teenager. Later, around my 20s, I suddenly discovered the Beatles and the Rolling Stones but I guess my musical idol has always been Strauss.
Then came the hostage crisis during which Carter did nothing to rattle the ayatollahs who hung tough until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, when they suddenly backed down.
Jason Momoa became a really good friend of ours when he played Khal Drogo. We loved hanging out with Momoa, and suddenly we couldn’t bring him to Belfast anymore.
The age I’m at now, you go from being a young girl to suddenly you blossom into a woman. You ripen, you know? And then you start to rot.
I suddenly find out that I’m 60, and I get shocked by the number, because I feel like I’m 20.
It’s not only imagination, it’s the distortion of the vision. You suddenly think, This person is idealistic, this person is strong, this person has dreams, when you know better most of the time. You put what you want to see on people.
I’ve always done drama, but I suppose ‘Tyrannosaur’ was a bit of a watershed moment for me. It was like when Kathy Burke did ‘Nil By Mouth’ – suddenly, people were saying, ‘Oh, she can do that, too.’
In 1998, the acting roles suddenly bottomed out. I was no longer getting scripts; even my agent stopped calling. When I finally got him on the phone to ask him what was going on, he paused, then said: ‘Well, Christine, you’re 45.’ I got rid of him.
If you take away the predators in the prairies and the national parks, you suddenly have an explosion of elk, and then you have a lack of the food source for the elk, so they strip all the ground bare and that takes away the cover, on and on and on and on. The whole food chain is disrupted.
Being a showrunner meant writing and producing a television show, period, but with ‘Lost,’ suddenly it became part of the job to promote and be the face of the brand. In a weird way, the story was as much the star as any of the actors, so people wanted to hear from us.
No one hit home runs the way Babe did. They were something special. They were like homing pigeons. The ball would leave the bat, pause briefly, suddenly gain its bearings, then take off for the stands.
I have been doing stuff for a long time now and you would be in people’s consciousness. But when you get something like a gift to play Ted Hastings, and some fabulous writing to get behind and a great crew, it suddenly allows people to go – ‘I always knew he was good.’
If someone suddenly lost their director the day before shooting and wanted me to step in, I’d be willing to. But I’d do brain surgery the same way. I’m always up for something new.
Sometimes, it is precisely when you discover that you are living very happily that you suddenly find yourself in danger. To be happy means to discover that you are exposed to being hurt.
Young Jimmy Dean fell off the world as suddenly as he had come.
I’m always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else’s contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we’re demons.
The only thing I consider appalling would be to suddenly become a vegetable and a burden on other people. A soul slowly dying out, trapped in a body in which the insides gradually sabotage me – that, I think, would be terrifying.
To write, I think one must sit in one place and be bored. Boredom is a very good state for writers to be. Things cook away in your head when you’re bored, and suddenly one day, you have a book or a germ of a book.
We are meeting with Sony, and we have a couple of other labels that suddenly have interest and that’s really great because none of them have actually heard our stuff.
But I think it’s more that when you’re young, you’re invincible, you’re immortal – or at least you think you are. The possibilities are limitless, you’re inventing the future. Then you get older and suddenly you have a history. It’s fixed. You can’t change anything. I find that a bit disturbing, to be honest.
I could suddenly see the pressures all around; these endless magazines and cheap reality TV programmes poking at women, humiliating us for every flaw. It makes me so angry. I really wonder what it is we are doing to ourselves, because I do think women can be the worst ones for picking each other apart.
When Louis XIV assumed the reins of government France suddenly and wonderfully came to her maturity; it was as if the whole nation had burst into splendid flower.
I was the laziest person around. Suddenly, one day, I decided to become an actor. Thank God for that whimsical decision: else, by now, I’d have been a 140-kilo, butter-chicken-bingeing hotelier.
Preparation for old age should begin not later than one’s teens. A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.
When you’re tied to one show, you are very much at the mercy of the writers, so you can suddenly get a script where you have a heart attack and die.
I don’t want to spoil the magic, but it’s a very curious thing that honestly baffles me. It’s the nearest we’ll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is a bit odd. Other aspects you work out more – you rework sentences, you rework imagery. But not characters.
The Internet is going to have a bigger impact on content creators than the television ever had. The reason why that’s the case is that suddenly you’re able to tell stories 24/7 in the home, out of the home, in every room of the home. A television screen can be in your pocket through a smartphone.
When you win, suddenly this celebrity status is hoisted upon you.
You will suddenly realize that the reason you never changed before was because you didn’t want to.
You suddenly find yourself somewhere and you wonder, how did I get in this room? That happens to me all the time, every day!
I know that everyone wants to know about ‘Downton Abbey,’ but the truth is that it was only a few days out of my life. Still, you play a distinctive part on a hit series, and everyone suddenly knows who you are. Isn’t it crazy how this business works?
Suddenly women’s lib had made me feel my life had been wasted.
I wasn’t even prepared to be an actress. I was 17 when I came out of high school, and suddenly became Miss World and then I became an actress.
My parents were not musical, and they were not effervescent people; everything was very quiet. The music that I played was loud; it used to drive them up the wall. My father died, and that was a tragedy for everybody, but suddenly I didn’t have anybody to stop me from doing what I wanted to do.
And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball’s profitability by ‘running the game like a business.’
People change their opinion according to your position. And both politicians and bureaucrats begin to take you more seriously, as they suddenly feel you have become more important.
I’d say people recognize me, but having children recognize me is the best. It is a very special thing. Suddenly you feel like you have the power to make the children’s dreams come true, and it’s better than anything else.
It was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we’d play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day.
