Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

Because the heart beats under a covering of hair, of fur, feathers, or wings, it is, for that reason, to be of no account?

You can really get poked in the back and not feel it very much, but just a feather around your lips and you really do feel it.

When you're surrounded by feathers and sequins and ridiculous Lycra outfits, it's impossible not to have a smile on your face.

It is true I am rather taken up with dress; but as to feathers, every one wears them, and it would seem extraordinary if I did not.

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.

In painting feathers, you want to create the look of feathers, but if you try to paint all the feathers, you have nothing but disaster.

Pride's chickens have bonny feathers, but they are an expensive brood to rear. They eat up everything, and are always lean when brought to market.

'The Tudors' was ground-breaking in the sense that it did ruffle the feathers of classical historians and alter the way people did period drama at the time.

I make body chains that come from the neck, cross in the middle of your chest, then go around your waist. I mix them with feathers for a gypsy, bohemian style.

I ruffle a lot of feathers. And I'm also selective - that makes you a troublemaker. But so be it. I laid a cornerstone for black actors, and that makes me happy.

I think for us - and for a lot of people in the Church of Satan - we definitely like ruffling people's feathers and poking fun at organized religion a little bit.

They said they wanted a lot of feathers, glitter, colourful colours. A costume. So I had a lady here in Calgary make it. She just kind of put together what I had in mind.

The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words - without locks, open on my shelves.

A mourning dove's beauty is an understated one: the colors of its feathers ranging through various shades of gray and drab violet, often with a striking splash of turquoise around the eyes.

I think inherently, a little bit, I'm a bit of a pleaser, and I want people to like me and be nice, and to not ruffle feathers and just make everybody happy and stuff. It's a personality flaw.

Coaches will do what they can but it doesn't necessarily bother me. You are an international referee for a reason. If things like that are going to ruffle your feathers, don't bother doing the job.

I have made bouquets of pleats, bouquets of flowers, bouquets of ruffles, bouquets of feathers. Often I design in mousseline, held tightly around the waist, and with something else going on all around.

Sure, the Internet is the future, but what we do on the Internet is still very primal. It's all about connecting to other people, sharing emotion. It's our new feathers or face paint. It's all very raw.

I've been doing 'The Bachelor' long enough that I don't really care whose feathers I ruffle and how many waves I cause, because my personal life is much more important to me than my professional life now.

I collect firearms, and I've got a Winchester, an Indian rifle. It has tacks for every warrior that was shot, like notches on a pistol, and it's got feathers and beads hanging off it. It's like a work of art.

In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion.

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

I think we could jam a bit more in our coffins than we do. I'm going to have some books, some I haven't finished or haven't read, some feathers and nice bits and pieces, the odd note. Just on the journey for the next bit.

The amusing thing about 'X-Force' is that it was highly rated - and hated - in about equal measure, Which suited me just fine. If no-one's feathers were a little ruffled, we probably wouldn't have been doing our jobs right.

Birds themselves are so interesting and intelligent, and they give so many cues without being verbal, so they say such great things. Feathers are superior to fur, even. They're so beautiful, and nature uses such amazing colors.

In Rio Bravo when Duke makes love to Feathers, the scene dissolves to the next morning where we see him putting on his vest and almost humming. It was subtle, but you knew what happened. Give me a towel and some blankets any day!

My view on politics is much more grassroots oriented; it's not old boy network oriented, so I tend to, you know, come at it a little bit stronger, a little bit more street-wise, if you will. That's rubbed some feathers the wrong way.

When you make the decision to call somebody out of the blue and say you want to talk to them about the worst thing that has happened to you, and I'm going to turn it into a cartoon... you're bound to ruffle some feathers or turn people off.

I practically lived in the woods when I was a kid, avoiding grown-ups and my dysfunctional family, pretending I was half-wolf, a feral child who napped in nests made out of ferns, ate wild blueberries, and wove sticks and feathers into her hair.

A friend of mine has a big farm in the desert, and she picks up feathers and roadkill for me, then makes it into clothes. I think it's cool to wear roadkill. If I died and somebody wanted to wear my teeth around their neck to VMAs, I'd feel honored.

It's the little details I love. How to fletch your arrows with owl feathers, because owls fly silently, so maybe your arrows will, too. How to carry fire in a piece of smouldering fungus wrapped in birchbark. These are the things which help a world come alive.

I grew up reading Updike. I remember being alarmed to find that he had published short stories by the time he was 22. I think 'Pigeon Feathers' was the first collection of stories I read. Only much later did I discover his non-fiction reviewing and art criticism.

My friends call my style 'old man chic.' I wear loafers and stylish sweatpants. I love to stay comfortable, so I definitely funk it up, but I'm always comfortable. I wear lots of hats and feathers, and I kind of have a little obsession with Native American jewelry.

I think women have long been defined by their roles as procreators and wives, and we're expected to serve, take care of, say 'Yes,' and not ruffle any feathers. Women, in particular, are sometimes not allowed to consider who they are outside of the roles that they play.

Howard Stern gave me the best advice about Twitter and the N word. He said maybe onstage people get the intention behind the joke, but a tweet is 140 characters or less, and maybe that's why people overreact. I don't need to rustle any more feathers and lose any investors.

In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called 'White Feathers.' It was produced in the studio theatre at the students' union in early 1999, when I was 21. It's 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.

I was very into animals and nature, and really obsessed with cats and monkeys. I used to play in the woods, wander off into the woods for hours. I'd bring a clipboard and think that I was doing some work out there, following the trails of raccoons or collecting bird feathers.

In 1990, my wife and I were married in her village in southwestern Uganda. The festivities went on for three days, and all the while a couple of dozen gray-crowned cranes, with regal bonnets of sun-shot yellow feathers, were pecking and padding around in the adjacent savanna.

Some people like just sitting down and being taken for a ride. That's a beautiful thing that fiction can do. But it's not the only thing. In television and film, people are ready to accept any kind of jump cut, but the slightest disturbance on the page ruffles their feathers.

I do love one-upmanship sometimes, like when you see kids breakdancing and who can do the best tricks. It's common, it's in our nature as animals, like the birds of paradise who've got the best feathers and that sort of stuff. But it's fun when it's impulsive and it's about fun.

I got into animals by drawing hair follicles. I liked drawing hair, and from that I got into feathers and fur, then into images of animals. The patterning is the same, but the proportions of the body change from one animal to the next. A lot of it is just geometry and consciousness.

The feathers have been retired to the London Hard Rock Cafe. I don't obsess about it as much. Also, it's strange - the better physical shape I get in, the less I care about what suit I'm covering myself up in. I'm not really out to flaunt it, but I'm just more comfortable in my own skin.

When I got a call from Hansal Mehta, the CEO of White Feathers, asking me to come for one of their films, I was very happy. I thought they'd have an interesting role for me. But when I got to know they just wanted me to stand in for Sanjay Dutt for some scenes, I decided to give this offer the pass.

My own feelings of where I am in this world and the questions that I am asking myself, I started to explore them through the story 'Four Feathers' and through this actor called Heath Ledger. I knew that I had to find a 21-year-old who could play wisdom at the end. He's only 21 or 22, and I tested him.

What dinosaur traits are missing from an ostrich? The ostrich has a toothless beak, but there are mutations that cause teeth and claws to come back to their mouth and limbs. You need to replace the feathers with scales, but there are no feathers on their legs and feet, so you just need to make its whole body like its legs are.

The chance of any species reaching and then surviving on an island as distant as one of the Hawaiian chain is infinitesimal, but despite the extraordinary odds, plants and seeds found their way ashore, carried by the tide or blown by trade winds, inside birds or in their feathers, in the branches of trees and in the jetsam of sunken ships.

I went to department stores, and there was nothing that I really loved. All the shoes were too complicated, too crazy, too ridiculous, too extreme. The platforms were so high; the shoes were so ugly, covered in crystals and feathers and crap. I just thought, 'Maybe somebody wants a beautifully simple, sexy shoe that they can actually walk in.'

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