"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."
I savour the adulation and love I have been getting from my fans and the blessings of elders in my family. Fourteen years have given me a lot and I can't thank God and the industry enough.
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
I've lost a million and a half on the horses and dice in the last two years. And the funny part is, I still like 'em, and if someone handed me another million I'd put it right in the nose
of some horse that looked good to me.
In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D—— He was an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see of D—— since 1806.
We are not going to have a situation where our education spending goes back to its lowest level since the year 2000 despite a larger population and more kids to educate. We know that the single most important thing in terms of how well we can compete around the world is the quality of our workforce. We can't do that to our kids.
In five years' time I'd like to be a mum. I want to settle down and have a family, definitely sooner rather than later. I'd like to have finished my second album too, maybe even my third. I'd like a sound that sticks around that other people are inspired by and that people know is me.
I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they're going to look like in ten to fifteen years time. Take Wrigley's chewing gum. I don't think the internet is going to change how people chew gum.
You say, "Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse." And that's enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
In 2002, a lot of the pundits didn't get the off-year elections right. In 2004, a lot of people thought I was going down eight days before the election.
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, [it] could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.
Sometimes they're nothing, sometimes they're something, sometimes there's a connection that years later may show up. All of this information is useful.