For seven years, I had a business relationship in Milan, Milano. Dealing with Italians, just, let me tell you... Are we the same? Good lord, no! That's why Europe's fun - it's fun because it's different. A political project that seeks to make it all the same - it's ghastly.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life. It's akin to using a bulldozer to catch a butterfly, destroying a whole ecosystem for the sake of a few pounds of protein. We wouldn't do this on land, so why do it in the oceans?

The ghastly thing about being a producer is that, once the curtain goes up, there is nothing you can do. At least when you are in it, you have some measure of control. If something goes wrong, you can maybe put it right. When you are in the audience, there is nothing you can do.

I don't believe in the term 'guilty pleasure,' because it implies I should feel ashamed for liking something. A real guilty pleasure would be, I don't know, taking gratification in some stranger's ghastly death or something - which I guess I do enjoy, because I read a ton of true crime.

I'm not a stereotypically beautiful woman, and I'm so happy that I'm not. I've seen those ladies - the need to be attractive at all times is ghastly. Also, in your twenties, if you are beautiful, everything comes to you, so you never need to develop a personality. I never had that problem.

My uncle worked in emergency wards dealing with people who came in with terrible injuries. He talked about the sketch shows they would put on to lighten the atmosphere. You often find this sense of grim humor in hospitals. The injuries people are suffering are ghastly. You have to laugh at something or you'd otherwise cry.

It's so important to keep a marriage alive with small treats and doing little things for each other. Just remembering to say nice things and to have listening time is vital. That ghastly phrase 'quality time' means taking three minutes to sit down and be still with someone rather than yelling over your shoulder as you rush out.

It should tell you something that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency invented the Taliban in the early 1990s only because Hekmatyar, its primary U.S.-bankrolled proxy in the war for control of Afghanistan, had proved too bloodthirsty after the Soviets withdrew, even by the low standards of the ISI's ghastly generals in Rawalpindi.

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