I'm doing a program with NAFME for music and education in schools, and for a week, we will be getting in a bus and traveling across the United States. We're starting at Disney World and ending at the Grand OIe Opry. We will be performing at different schools, and I wrote a song for the program called 'Always Sing.'

I read a lot when I was young. All the obvious, all the greats, from 'Le Grand Meaulnes,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' 'Fear and Loathing,' 'Catcher in the Rye,' 'The Bell Jar,' 'The Female Eunuch,' 'Valley of the Dolls,' 'The Feminine Mystique,' Tom Wolfe. Then, film took over for me. Film was so exciting in the '70s.

British culture is very cynical sometimes of overt displays of sentimentality, and I think that becomes almost a suspicion of emotion, or a suspicion of someone making a grand statement. It is always easier to be ironic, or 'meta', or coolly postmodern. But I think there is such a thing as authentic sentimentality.

My dad, Bob Blum, used to dash across Grand Central's main terminal catwalk several times daily as a young CBS correspondent, running copy from newsroom to studio and back - because CBS' first broadcasts were from Grand Central Terminal. The pictures on people's television sets used to shake when the trains came in!

In 1988, I earned something like £700,000. Yeah! I was earning 10 grand an hour opening shopping centres. Yeah! The most I earned in one day was 65 grand. I opened the Alton Towers fun ride in the morning, did a commercial in the afternoon and an appearance at a nightclub in the evening. Sixty-five grand in one day!

When I started out on 'Min Kamp', I was so extremely frustrated over my life and my writing. I wanted to write something majestic and grand, something like 'Hamlet' or 'Moby Dick,' but found myself with this small life - looking after kids, changing diapers, quarreling with my wife, unable to write anything, really.

I hold that the beginning of modern Irish drama was in the winter of 1898, at a school feast at Coole, when Douglas Hyde and Miss Norma Borthwick acted in Irish in a Punch and Judy show; and the delighted children went back to tell their parents what grand curses 'An Craoibhin' had put on the baby and the policeman.

I've never had the experience of 10 years at Unilever and five years at Coca Cola. But I'm not the marketing director who only wants 25 per cent a year on the revenues. In the old days, you sold something, and you would be happy. At Ajax, we thought we needed more from that than selling a seat and making five grand.

For me, 'The Social Network' isn't about Facebook. It certainly isn't about how people use it. It's about a flawed character and his pursuit of that grand idea that defines him and validates his life and how far he'll go to get it, and the repercussions that come as a result of that - what he gives up in the process.

City farming is not only possible, it is the very definition of the kind of meaningful, sustainable innovation we will need to meet the grand challenges of the 21st century: climate change; population growth; ageing population; urbanization; rising demand for energy, food and water; poverty; and access to healthcare.

What evolution tells us is that we are part of a grand, dynamic, and ever-changing fabric of life that covers our planet. Even to a person of faith, in fact especially to a person of faith, an understanding of the evolutionary process should only deepen their appreciation of the scope and wisdom of the creator's work.

The first songs I learned were 'It Takes a Worried Man' and Woody Guthrie's 'Grand Coulee Dam,' 'Rock Island Line' - those kind of American folk songs that were probably on the edge of blues. After that was Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry songs. And then I heard Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Big Bill Broonzy on the radio.

When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 88, she was the oldest person ever to receive the prize and one of only 11 female winners in its history. Her award was the end of a very long journey from a remote farm in Rhodesia to a banquet at Stockholm's Stadshus, the grand city hall in Stockholm.

I remember Geauga Lake. I remember Six Flags. I remember going to the mall. I hung out there. These big, grand places that served as pinnacles of the community were not only institutions or places of commerce. They were communal spaces where a lot of people went and shared good memories. These are very nostalgic places.

When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.

The duty of the grand jury is to separate fact from fiction, after a full and impartial examination of all the evidence involved, and decide if evidence supported the filing of any criminal charges against Darren Wilson. They accepted and completed this monumental responsibility in a conscientious and expeditious manner.

A James Bond film can be artistically fulfilling. Absolutely it can. It can be complex, and it can be interesting. I consider Bond movies to be an extension of popular theatre, a kind of modern mythology. You see the same sort of action in 'Punch and Judy' or in the folk theatre of various cultures, like 'Grand Guignol.'

It occurred to me that memorials shouldn't be grand. If you really want to honor the memory of a tragedy, you shouldn't create areas of calm reflection. You should make people uncomfortable. Put them in the shoes of those who perpetrated and those who suffered. Then ask, would they be able to forgive in these situations?

When you come to a hotel room, you want it to be grand, functional and beautiful. But you don't want things that are not useful. Sometimes you go to hotels and there are all these frames and pictures of people you don't know, and you end up hiding everything in the drawer, and then housekeeping come and put it out again.

I saw Bob Arum out in America, I saw him walking through the lobby in the MGM Grand. I basically went over and said: 'You're running out of opponents for Crawford and I'm the guy to beat him. I'm here.' I saw Terence Crawford, he said he was ready for it, so everybody is on the same page. Everyone wants to make the fight.

There are artists or filmmakers or cinematographers who have had long careers who, maybe to reinvent themselves or just to stay in a secure place, layer it on or ham it up, if I can use that expression, or make grand choices that don't feel as authentic as what they did to make us fall in love with them in the first place.

People assume NFL cheerleaders are within some vague sniffing distance of the good life, but a Ben-Gal is paid seventy-five bucks per game. That is correct: seventy-five bucks for each of ten home games. The grand cash total per season does not keep most of them flush in hair spray, let alone gas money to and from practice.

Where I grew up in St. Louis, Saturday was country music day on television. We'd watch the Bill Anderson show, the Willie Nelson show, the Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner show, and always the Grand Ole Opry. My parents were fans of that music, and my friend's parents would pull the TV out and watch those shows on the porch.

I think when you're younger and you're watching people play on TV, you always say that you want to be at the French Open - you want to be playing Grand Slams. But then actually being there doing it, it kind of blows you away thinking, Wow, I actually used to think maybe I could do that one day, and now I'm actually doing it.

I have a former Baltimore City police officer's uniform and his robe and hood. He was the grand dragon, which means state leader. His day job, what paid his bills, he was a Baltimore City police officer, not an undercover officer in the Klan gathering intelligence, but a bona fide Klansmen on the Baltimore City police force.

Public buildings, built from the rates and taxes paid by past generations, are being auctioned off by impoverished councils who need the money to pay the redundancies of workers they can no longer afford to employ. Many of these grand Victorian buildings will be turned into flats that most people will never be able to afford.

I grew up on hip-hop. I grew up on Run-D.M.C., Whodini, LL when I was in college, so I'm more of a music fan. I probably have the most eclectic collection of music in my Grand Cherokee. Literally, in a span of a week, I'll go from 2Pac to Boyz II Men to Sister Hazel, right down to West Side Story or the Wiz. I love show tunes.

Every president to hold office has espoused some version of Americanism - the truths that we hold self-evident, even when those truths are not always in evidence. But for all their grand rhetoric and mostly good deeds, none was able to seal the deal on the trifecta of equality, plurality and socioeconomic ascendancy. Obama has.

I never really had any grand aspirations of mainstream country success because I know what that entails, and I'd probably be too much trouble for people to work with. If I can just reach the point where I can get 200 or 300 people in small clubs and I'm carving out enough money to pay my bills, then I'm the happiest guy I know.

I have always wanted to make a series of films which would be like an 'emotional history' that conveys what it feels like to live through history as an experience rather than a grand story. It would be about the relationship between the tiny fragments and moments of personal experience, and the continual backdrop of big events.

It is against the spirit of our non-discriminating times to openly prefer one sort of music to another, so let's just say that hearing grand orchestral music in a public place is exhilarating in a way that hearing popular music never can be, if only because, in a popular music age, a full orchestra is less familiar to our ears.

In his final year in office, Clinton decided that his contribution to Middle East peace would lie not in the removal of Saddam Hussein but in a grand attempt to resolve the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. With this, he missed his last chance to deal forcefully with the man he was publicly committed to overthrowing.

If somebody wants me to speak in, say, Chicago, a limousine picks me up at the door to brings me to the airport. I fly at the front of the plane, and a limousine meets me at the other end to take me to a grand hotel, and usually an envelope is left for me with a per diem, maybe $150-a-day walking around money, and then I go home.

When I visited Moscow for the first time in 1998, I wandered into the historic Metropol Hotel as a curious tourist simply to ogle the giant painted glass ceiling that hangs over the grand restaurant off the lobby. It was the memory of that short visit that prompted me, some years later, to set 'A Gentleman in Moscow' in the hotel.

'Knowing' is one of those movies where you're going to get the spectacle, and you're going to have the entertainment in the grand science fiction tradition. But also, it will perhaps stimulate some discussion to help you sort out on your own where you might choose to go in terms of your own needs. Now, I say that without preaching.

You have to have a big vision and take very small steps to get there. You have to be humble as you execute but visionary and gigantic in terms of your aspiration. In the Internet industry, it's not about grand innovation, it's about a lot of little innovations: every day, every week, every month, making something a little bit better.

There is an image of me in France that is a long stretch from who I really am. I read about this girl who lives in grand hotels and has affairs with American actors - I don't recognise this girl at all. Sometimes it makes me depressed. Sometimes it makes me laugh. Sometimes I think, 'Gosh, that sounds nice, I'd love to be that girl.'

I love the Capitol rotunda. It's just so big and so grand, and I love being in the Capitol at night when it's empty, and you can go stand in the Capitol rotunda and bask in the silence of history. You can sort of imagine all of the things that have happened inside that Rotunda from presidents lying in state to other important events.

We didn't sit around the dining table talking about Madam Walker, but the silverware that we used every day had her monogram on it and our china for special occasions had been Madam Walker's china... and the baby grand piano on which I learned to read music had been in A'Lelia Walker's apartment in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.

I knew I wanted the parties in 'The Queen of the Night' to be convincing, beautiful, and also dramatic: situations where significant things happened on a scale that was both grand and intimate. There were several texts that helped me think about how to do this, and one of the most important ones was Charlotte Bronte's novel 'Villette.'

It's very hard to make grand, romantic gestures on a mandolin, and there are times, particularly when playing Bach, that you long for just a little more sustain. But for better or worse it's my voice, and the trade-off comes with increased intimacy. It's like you're beckoning the audience closer: 'C'mere, I've got something to tell ya.'

I love soccer, love tennis... Roger Federer has been a favourite for a long, long time. The kind of consistency he has shown, 16 Grand Slam titles... The way he handles himself in pressure situations is admirable... He is so calm... In soccer, I'm a huge fan of Barcelona... I like watching Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and David Villa.

I believe in working with your morning brain - you have your coffee, and then maybe you'll start thinking about the grand plan and what's going to happen in the next arc, and then you write for a while, and then you get really dreamy, and over the course of the day or in the middle of the night, something comes, and you just throw it in!

I had this grand idea that Elvira's kind of the Santa Claus of Halloween - at the malls, you'd have an Elvira there. Girls would dress as Elvira just like guys dress as Santa Claus, and it's not the real thing, but they'll pose for pictures, sign autographs. Of course, I couldn't go around to every mall, so we'd have to get more Elviras.

Bombino's a super modest guy, very nice. His whole crew is a bunch of characters and he's definitely the Grand Poobah. I don't think the other guys are that much younger than him, but he definitely feels like the wise man; you just sort of get that sense when you're around him. He doesn't say that much but he's humble and well-respected.

Ray Bradbury is, for many reasons, the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship, Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be, should be, and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible, willing to tolerate and to teach, happy to inspire but also to be inspired.

Maybe you weren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth, but like every American, you carry a deed to 635 million acres of public lands. That's right. Even if you don't own a house or the latest computer on the market, you own Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and many other natural treasures.

The situation of Leh is a grand one, the great Kailas range, with its glaciers and snowfields, rising just behind it to the north, its passes alone reaching an altitude of nearly 18,000 feet; while to the south, across a gravelly descent and the Indus Valley, rise great red ranges dominated by snow-peaks exceeding 21,000 feet in altitude.

At different times in my life, I've made grand statements like, 'I want these many kids, and I want them by this age.' I think, with every year that goes by, I accept that I don't know when it's going to happen or how it's going to happen. I'll just take it one day at a time, and when I'm ready, I'll be ready. It'll reveal itself, I guess.

I started off with a company, InfoSpace, with my own funding. The company was listed among the most successful companies and I went on to start Intelius and Moon Express. Now, I focus my time on using the skills of an entrepreneur to solve many of the grand challenges facing us in the areas of education, healthcare, clean water and energy.

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