I simply adore getting dressed up for a special occasion. I feel incredible stepping out in luxurious fabrics and a bit of bling. That’s also how I feel about special-occasion dining rooms. Because these aren’t everyday spaces, they contain all sorts of drama for that once-in-a-while ‘wow’ event.
I think that one of the things that I can do is I seem to have the ability to zoom in super tight for very small details, but then jump back for sort of that big picture perspective. And I think that ultimately, that’s one of my strengths, because you have – every detail matters.
Sporting competitions seem to be what we obsess over, frankly. So if we can put engineering, science, technology into a format of healthy, fun competition, we can attract all sorts of kids that might not see the kind of activity we do as accessible or rewarding.
Writing is like any other sort of sport. In order for you to get better at it, you have to exercise the muscle.
History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.
Coming to Australia, it was just really magical for me. It just had the wow factor of a different sort of place and, more so, just being with a family that wanted to love me and to have me, because I knew back then, before coming to Australia, there was no way of getting back home or finding my real family.
All the people who fought for freedom were my heroes. I mean, that was the sort of story I liked reading… freedom struggles and so on.
Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.
There are various sorts of curiosity; one is from interest, which makes us desire to know that which may be useful to us; and the other, from pride which comes from the wish to know what others are ignorant of.
I’m of the school of thought where, if you can’t sort something out for yourself, no one can help you. Rehab is great for some people but not others.
I do miss ‘Battlestar’, the cast and crew. That was a pretty well-oiled machine. It’s sort of like you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. But I go to a lot of sci-fi conventions, and I love going and talking about the show.
Why should we, however, in economics, have to plead ignorance of the sort of facts on which, in the case of a physical theory, a scientist would certainly be expected to give precise information?
Whenever I cook, I think of Spanish music, so I always have to listen to some sort of salsa. It gets your body going.
We all have fundamental beliefs of one sort or another, and it is very threatening if somebody is saying they’re wrong.
I think the personal stories that I tell in my life, I think, sort of do add up to say that you can fail and fail and fail again and continue to move forward.
I think basically becoming famous has taken the place of going to Heaven in modern society, hasn’t it? That’s the place where your dreams will come true. It’s an act of faith now; they think that’s going to sort things out.
To confront those fears, in a controlled environment, where there’s 300 people around you going through the same thing, it’s this weird sort of yin and yang.
When there’s a status quo, usually what shakes everybody up is some sort of military confrontation, at which point we all come running and screaming to pick up the pieces.
I think every job I do, I sort of look for the challenge in. I mean, that’s why we do this job. It’s not, you know, obviously not for the money or for the fame, it’s for, I guess finding out more about yourself.
It used to be the one or the other, right? You were the ‘bad girl’ or the ‘good girl’ or the ‘bad mother’ or ‘the good mother,’ ‘the horrible businesswoman who eschewed her children’ or ‘the earth mother who was happy to be at home baking pies,’ all of that stuff that we sort of knew was a lie.
Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.
When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.
It’s always an interesting sort of adventures that gets someone into a movie.
Climbing is definitely very much strength-to-weight ratio. At the same time, I’ve never dieted or restricted calories. You’re just sort of mindful about not getting plump.
Peace is not a state – it is a choice, and you have to remake it every day. It’s possible to get a sort of stability, a habit of peace, but it’s like an egg balanced, spinning, on its point: lose your momentum, and your equilibrium is gone, too.
It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
I grew up – my dad, every time I was with my dad, he was always – not always, but he wrote. He’s a writer. So he was always in his office writing. He made a plan and, like, a point of, ‘This is my work. I’m going to do this every day for these amount of hours.’ So I think that’s where I got, like, a work sort of ethic.
Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn’t take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn’t exist. I don’t even think the word ‘gay’ was in existence.
Horror is so often a ‘thinkless’ genre, sort of considered popcorn movies, but you really put a lot of, not just heart and soul, but a lot of physical energy into it.
I always really loved soul music but all my friends were into the new romantic scene. I’d go to new romantic clubs and then go home and listen to soul music. I was sort of ashamed of listening to disco and soul music!
I have such a respect for comedy. It’s a lot harder than doing drama, in my opinion; you have to have sort of an innate sense of humor. There are rules to comedy you can learn. But ultimately, it really does require a certain point of view on the world, and that really does appeal to me.
Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It’s a cacophony, it’s like a madness I think that’s been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.
You’ve gotta be very careful that grace and politeness do not merge into a banality of behavior, where we’re just nice, sort of ‘death by cupcake.’
Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you’re suffering. There’s a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life.
Our will makes constantly a sort of agreement with the world, whereby, if the world will continually show some respect to the will, the will shall consent to be strenuous in its industry.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
The Academy Awards were basically created by the industry to promote pictures. They weren’t really to acknowledge the performances. Then it became sort of this a great popularity contest and now, it’s an incredible show and it’s seen all over the world.
I went to an ordinary primary school, and then I started performing in a show called ‘Billy Elliot’ on the West End, and that was sort of my drama school.
Design is about point of view, and there should be some sort of woman or lifestyle or attitude in one’s head as a designer.
I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.
Half of acting is you’re very intimidated, overcoming your fears, letting yourself be vulnerable in front of people and that sort of stuff.
My dream is to map every archaeological site in the world because, if we can do that, then we have this massive global data base that all sorts of global heritage organizations and heritage organizations within countries can use, and they can use that information to protect what’s there.
Gardening has just sort of grown on me. I find it therapeutic. And I like smelly things.
The so-called modern conveniences may, in fact, be extremely inconvenient – everything seems to exist as a distraction from any sort of deeper thought or contemplation.
It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.
I was born and brought up in the countryside. I used to live in a sort of converted stables on the grounds of a castle, and I spent a lot of my childhood running around with a pretend sword pretending to be Robert the Bruce.
If everyone in the music business were brutally honest about what their intentions were then you could sort things out, but it’s all smoke and mirrors.
I guess I’m still sort of feisty and a little bit of a tomboy.
I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.
I’ve got a few reasons why I’ve got to maintain stability. I’ve got into wanting people to hear my music. I’ve got something I want people to hear because I know they’ll like it. They’ve gotta like it! The songs I’ve been writing are the sort of things you have to like.
