There is another side to me which people don't often see, but it's very hard for me to show that. When I do interviews, I'm talking to people I don't know and when you speak to a stranger you don't open up, do you? In my position, people are always looking for something to say about me. And anything I do say, given half-a-chance they'll turn it round into something spectacular so I've got to be very careful. That's why it's only my friends and family who know the real me. Now my wife, Lainya, she could tell you a few stories.
Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.
The real two-party system in America is the Meanies and the Weenies. The Meanies want to take away your benefits, and the Weenies want to compromise with them.
Ah! What avails the classic bent
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme-
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
There is a real diversity of talent and background on the A list so as to better reflect our society in all walks. There are people who have been candidates before, Councillors, Doctors, business leaders, charity campaigners.
Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.
Anecdote: It is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; violent physical passions do not in themselves differentiate men from each other, but rather tend to reduce them to the same state.
We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult where everything speaks except our mouths. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.
That in the soul which is called mind (by mind I mean that whereby the soul thinks and judges) is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing. For this reason it cannot reasonably be regarded as blended with the body
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by anything short- livedor local, but abode by real and abiding traits.
The meditative state is the highest state of existence. So long as there is desire, no real happiness can come. It is only the contemplative, witness-like study of objects that brings to us real enjoyment and happiness.