Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I heard the word 'cancer,' I was in bits. I panicked, I think everyone does, it was very scary, horrible. Thankfully, the melanoma does not appear to have spread. They'll continue to monitor me, I've got scars on my face, on my back. Good thing I was never worried about my good looks.
'Macbeth' is one of the best operas ever, and doing it was a great experience. I added some things to the opera based from my experience on the movie - such as some of the special effects and bits of film - to make it new and interesting. It was a very good work and a very good experience.
Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.
I did a lot of theatre when I started out. It was the Lyceum, the Citz, the Tron and the Traverse. I came to London and did the Royal Court, the National, 'King Lear' at the Manchester Royal Exchange. I did little bits of comedy, like 'Rab C Nesbitt,' but I wasn't predominantly about comedy.
I actually do bits of my writing in sort of incidental spaces - when I'm traveling on the Tube or on a bus. More often than not, it's a reaction to how you feel about something, and if you're sitting down and concentrating on, 'I must write something,' then you can't have a truthful reaction.
In the past, I've been reluctant to share any bits of truth about myself or to really let people in on my reality. So I have said some things to throw people off the scent of what's really going on in my life. So I have sort of aided the media in printing these misconceptions, which I regret.
Texas was mostly short-grass and tall-grass prairie when modern Europeans arrived here. It really was a land of milk and honey. But when they brought all these cattle onto these relatively small bits of land, and the cattle were allowed to graze freely, they essentially destroyed the prairie.
Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss. If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss, you'll see toads, small insects, a whole host of life that prospers in that miniature environment. A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.
My process is messy and non-linear, full of false starts, fidgets, and errands that I suddenly need to run now; it is a battle to get something - anything - down on paper. I doodle in sketchbooks: bits of ideas, fragments of sentences, character names, single lines of dialogue with no context.
I don't believe in funerals. I believe in celebrating life, and showing people, while they're alive, how much I care about them. And I don't believe in this business of burial. I'm an organ donor. Whether its my skin or my eyeballs, use whatever bits are intact and put the rest in the garbage.
Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we've grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.
It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.
We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.
The movies I used to watch, I remember always being so angry because I felt like I, as a teenage girl, was never truly represented in a film. There were always bits of me that were represented - I'd watch 'Juno' and be like, 'Oh, well part of me is like that, but it's still not the whole thing.'
I was mainly raised by a working mum who didn't have much time or inclination for making food. So I had three or four basic meals: fish fingers and a tomato; a packet scotch egg and a tomato; pasta with a tin of tomatoes; and extra mild plastic-y cheddar chopped into cubes with bits of cucumber.
It doesn't thrill me to bits that the state has to use the tools of electronic surveillance to keep us safe, but it seems clear to me that it does, and that our right to privacy needs to be qualified, just as our other rights are qualified, in the interest of general security and the common good.
It's like, the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in, and your day is shredded to bits because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do.
The thing to keep in mind is that's how I started long before MTV and Twitter and Facebook. I studied at broadcasting school so I could learn how to shoot and edit videos, and tried to create my own television show so we could see through these wacky visions we had of funny bits we wanted to shoot.
In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.
It takes stamina to get up like an athlete every single night, seven to eight performances a week, 20 weeks in a row. And there are many young performers who only learn their craft in the two minute bits it takes to film a scene. You never learn the arc of storytelling, the arc of a character that way.
When I was a child, one of my first games was a time machine which I made for my brother - a big box covered in silver and bits of cellophane. I'd close him up in it and joggle him and say, 'We're in Victorian times now... and now we're in Egyptian times, and I can see all these pyramids and pharaohs.'
I did an audiobook for 'Rough Crossings,' which I thought was one of the best books I had published. But it was an absolute embarrassment to read it. All these horrible mucked-up bits of syntax, over-the-top adjectives. I found myself editing it while reading. Alert listeners will notice the difference.
By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are?
CG can do anything, but it can't do everything well. What it naturally can do is special effects. But using stop-motion comes from our desire to do handmade stuff. There are always going to be kids who get out whatever it might be - clay, bits of wire, Barbie dolls, Legos. They want to tell little stories.
For me, getting older doesn't mean throwing away a favourite-coloured lipstick or a fabulous pair of boots; instead, it's about harnessing all the great things I have learnt over the years about what does and doesn't suit me, and enjoying the way in which cleverly selected outfits can enhance the nice bits.
It's hard to say what you learn acting a part. You find bits and pieces of yourself that are inside the character you play. You locate the relatable aspects of that character to your own life. So, in a way, every part you play forces you to discover things about yourself you might not have learned otherwise.
Even the cleanest air, at the centre of the South Pacific or somewhere over Antarctica, has two hundred thousand assorted bits and pieces in every lungful. And this count rises to two million or more in the thick of the Serengeti migration, or over a six-lane highway during rush hour in downtown Los Angeles.
The Constitution remains brilliant in its overall design and sound with respect to the Bill of Rights and the separation of powers. But there are numerous archaic provisions that inhibit constructive change and adaptation. These constitutional bits affect the daily life of the republic and every citizen in it.
With 'Scratch,' our goal is to allow people to mix together all kinds of media, not just sounds, in creative ways. We want people to start from existing materials - grabbing an image, grabbing some sound, maybe even bits of someone else's program, and then extending them and mixing them to make them their own.
My agent asked if I fancied Robin Hood and I thought: 'Yeah, why not?' I hadn't watched it, to be honest, but I'd seen bits and knew it was really popular Saturday family viewing with heaps of action. I thought it would be great fun. I was up for a good old play-fighting and the scripts were terrifically exciting.
I always overwrite - really awful, long bits of script - and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories, I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does, I feel that that's a successful story.
I feel very protective in the first draft, when all the pieces are coming together. I work in a way that is not linear or chronological at all, even with the short story. I will just be writing bits and pieces, and then when I have all the pieces on the table, that for me is when it feels like the real work begins.
I've found that I snack less and concentrate better when I chew on a plastic stirrer - the kind that you get to stir your to-go coffee. I picked up this habit from my husband, who loves to chew on things. His favorite chew-toy is a plastic pen top, and gnawed pen tops and little bits of plastic litter our apartment.
In eighth grade, when I was just the school weirdo, my drama teacher put me in a play, and we came up with a few comedy bits. And that very first reaction, for an audience of supportive middle schoolers, I put my head out and pretended I got scared by the audience, and ducked back in. They all went: 'Yeah! That's great!'
I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to spend my time. Probably too much - I probably obsess over it. My friends think I do. But I feel like I kind of have to, because these days, it feels like little bits of my time kind of slip away from me, and when that happens, it feels like parts of my life are slipping away.
I was just doing bits and pieces of acting in the U.K. I'd been in the film 'Breaking and Entering' - Anthony Minghella gave me my start and I miss him dearly. Then I made the trip out to L.A., during one of their pilot seasons, which was when they were developing 'Gossip Girl,' and I auditioned, and things came together.
My biggest bits of advice are, write as much as you can, finish what you start, get a thick skin, don't take crap from anyone, but also live your life and have fun. The stereotype of a writer holed up alone all day is really unhelpful. You can't write real people and real emotion if you don't let yourself experience them.
I grew up in a deeply Catholic home. Our parents always encouraged us to march to our own drums, though, so some of us are still Catholic and some are not. That's always going to be a part of me though; little bits of it trickle into my work. Whether it's an embrace or a rejection, I'm not always sure, but I can't avoid it.
The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level - an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.
1925's 'The Lost World' is... really, everything a dinosaur movie should be. Like a dinosaur, this classic was once extinct too, existing as mere fragmentary footage and stills, but cinemaphile fossil-hunters have painstakingly excavated bits and pieces from obscure archives and assembled them into a nearly-complete animal.
One of my favorites is chilaquiles. It's corn tortilla chips in a simple, brothy tomato sauce with a little chile for heat. It's wonderfully homey. It has irresistible crispy bits and I love to eat it. And you can play around with it - add chicken, sliced red onions, or all these different things that can easily dress it up.
If you look at that incredible burst of fantastic characters that emerged in the late 19th century/early 20th century, you can see so many of the fears and hopes of those times embedded in those characters. Even in throwaway bits of contemporary culture you can often find some penetrating insights into the real world around us.
Most people in AI, particularly the younger ones, now believe that if you want a system that has a lot of knowledge in, like an amount of knowledge that would take millions of bits to quantify, the only way to get a good system with all that knowledge in it is to make it learn it. You are not going to be able to put it in by hand.
My adrenaline is definitely going, but it's mostly my real, laid-back persona carrying over on stage. When I first started, I was nervous, I'd be really high energy, and I'd be sweating. Now it's just my job. It's like a machinist who goes to work every day and uses the same drill bits. He's not worried about taking his finger off.
Honestly, not being evasive, but the great thing about Bond is that I have fifty years of movies - 23 movies and all the Ian Fleming novels and short stories, all of which are fodder. And when I'm working on the new Bond, I'm constantly going back to Fleming and the other movies - what are the bits and pieces, what are the resonances?
You have comedians who just do jokes, and they're called comics, not comedians. You have comedians that do bits - a person that has a lot of jokes that have a beginning, a middle and an end, but it's not a real story. And you have someone that does great stories, the one that blends those things together - that person is doing comedy.
I have spent many hours on the beach collecting sea glass, and I almost always wonder, as I bend to pick up chunk of bottle green or a shard of meringue white, what the history of the glass was. Who used it? Was it a medicine bottle? A bit of a ship's lantern? Is that bubbled piece of glass with the charred bits inside it from a fire?
Every day, I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls, and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls, and articles. I don't really know where I fit into the great scheme of things and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers.
Dad could talk about peace and love out loud to the world, but he could never show it to the people who supposedly meant the most to him: his wife and son. How can you talk about peace and love and have a family in bits and pieces - no communication, adultery, divorce? You can't do it, not if you're being true and honest with yourself.
I just write and do what I think is funny. Sometimes, you do have it in your head about certain bits. There are certain jokes where I know if I did them in certain situations, it would irk people. There are times where I look at the news and see a story going on, and I'm like, 'Wow, if I tweeted this, I would get press if I wanted to.'