I felt that it was deeply moving and profound, and of course everybody was like, "Oh, the president [Barack Obama] can sing!" Maybe a little off key! I actually think that the sermon reinforced the very nature of the grace that the victims' families had shown to the world.
Why should you think that I should woo in scorn? Scorn and derision never come in tears: Look, when I vow, I weep; and vows so born, In their nativity all truth appears. How can these things in me seem scorn to you, Bearing the badge of faith, to prove them true?
The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.
I actually think film and TV are sort of the same thing now. To me they're all motion pictures. There's a camera, a script, other actors and a director. Doing a sitcom is a little different. It's kind of a hybrid, half movie, half play, presented in a proscenium fashion - the camera's on one side of the line, the set on the other, the audience sitting behind the cameras.
A multitude is strong while it holds together, but so soon as each of those who compose it begins ro think of his own private danger, it becomes weak and contemptible.
I think we have to give religion its due. I think we have to respect those for whom religion is important, but equally respect those who can achieve good morality without religion.
I hate everything that does not relate to literature, conversations bore me (even if they relate to literature), to visit people bores me, the sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to the very soul. Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.
I think that today, faith drives so much of our politics, that I thought, "If you don't talk about it, you are missing a whole big part of what is going on politically."
I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instance or oatmeal. Then when the fugitive word was least expecting it I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.
We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.