Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.

I hardly ever use pencils. I'm left-handed and it's really messy if you're left-handed because of the graphite smudging. I use them more now than I used to because there's, like, 15,000 pencils all over my house.

I admire American women because they are really good at putting a look together that is sophisticated. As British girls, we lean toward being a bit more messy, a bit more undone, and maybe a little more eccentric.

Living with AIDS is like always having the sword of Damocles over your head. The disease is scarier than death itself. The disease is so messy, so devastating, so pervasive. It robs you of everything you hold dear.

I've gotten used to using individual lashes as well. A lot of girls will use strip eyelashes, but the glue comes out of each side and it gets messy. Individual lashes make your eyes look bigger and much more natural.

A lot of times, the inspiration for a novel is a messy bird's nest of shiny things. Little things that don't make a whole lot of sense or that, no matter how hard you look, cannot be found directly in the finished book.

To show a different side on 'Love & Hip Hop' and bring some validity to it and not just be ratchet, messy or whatever the case may be, it was cool to be that guy, not just from a fan standpoint but an artist standpoint.

With the likely nominations of Barack Obama by the Democrats and John McCain by the Republicans, one of these two parties is headed for a 2009 crack-up that could prove as messy as any party civil war in recent history.

Don't worry about the room being messy! Everything can't be perfect - you have to let some things go, and it's better to actually sit down on the floor with your child than spend time worrying about having a perfect house.

I'm quite a precious painter; my style is a messy fine art - sort of impressionist. I do portraits, I love painting other artists, but recently, I've been playing around with self portraits, putting on different characters.

I allow people to create, but I'm also marshalling everybody, which is difficult for my creativity, as I'm like a referee. Everybody else is kicking a ball. It is very messy. From the mess, though, you refine what is there.

Because she was raw and uncertain, and she liked to keep all the messy parts of herself to herself. ... As much as Lena liked to hide the mess and display the finished product, by this point she was all mess and no product.

Sunday is the day I do my laundry and clean. I'm always trying to get rid of stuff. Truthfully? I have a housekeeper that comes once a month, and I tend not to make things too messy for her. But I do have clothes everywhere.

In the scope of a happy life, a messy desk or an overstuffed coat closet is a trivial thing, yet I find - and I hear from other people that they agree - that getting rid of clutter gives a disproportionate boost to happiness.

I like everything perfect. Everything has to be neat. My sister is 5, and she's more messy than I am. I make my bed every morning, everything's perfect. My shoes are all arranged. It's sad. I'm a little like Ray, a little bit.

The great thing about scenes that involve nervous breakdowns - in the little experience I have doing them - is that there's no way to craft it. You just have to do it, and it sort of crafts itself in just being incredibly messy.

People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.

My workspace is a white room with a big computer monitor and a light box. It can be very messy. Sometimes I get into trouble with my husband for that. Then I run around like a lunatic cleaning up and creating the appearance of order.

I'm definitely a messy person... I know where everything is but I just can't organize. I don't make lists and find scripts on the laundry machine, and under my bed, or in the bathroom, kitchen. It's bad, I really need to take control.

I think that, a lot of times in Hollywood pictures, the reality, the messy reality of women's lives - it's avoided, because I think people are just afraid of it. There's a standard that women are set to, to try to keep everybody comfortable.

I have a problem with cabinets being messy and people just shoving things in and closing the door. I will lie in bed and not be able to sleep because I'll say to myself: 'I think I saw something in that cabinet that just shouldn't be there.'

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

I am so organized that it's dysfunctional. Everything has a place. I am a very visual person, so my environment is important to me. If my environment is messy, I can't think clearly. I don't like clutter. A clean desk is a clean mind for me.

Everyone's gone through a breakup, and I've dated girls in the past where... I've never had a messy breakup, thankfully, but I'm never the one to end it. I'm always caught off guard as to why things ended because I guess I'm oblivious in a way.

With messy food, or foods with a lot of sauce, you do 'The Hunch.' I learned it in Philly, watching the dudes in suits eat cheesesteaks. You keep your elbows above your hands because if you don't, the grease runs down your sleeve to your elbow.

The 'Grace of Kings' isn't a narrative about a return to some golden age, to a lost status quo ante. It portrays a dynamic world in transition, where the redistribution of power is messy, morally ambivalent, and only lurches toward more justice.

When you walk away from God, and you walk away from Christ, you're basically uprooting the very foundations of being. So I don't think there is an easy way to do that. Even for the guy who becomes an atheist out of it, it's messy. It ain't pretty.

Opening up the Capitol dome and giving the public a look at the inner workings of Congress - however messy they may be - certainly won't be pretty. But trust isn't earned by showing off only your Sunday best. The dirty laundry has to be aired, too.

If Disney wants ideas for a princess, make her an independent woman, one who is not afraid to face the daily struggles of life, and refuses to wear expensive dresses. Because we all know life is messy, and those dresses are too pretty to get dirty.

Emotions are messy and hard to figure out. Hard to know where you start and the next person stops. Even as an adult, that's a hard thing to know. As a kid, it can be really confusing, because it's all new and you're trying to sort of make your map.

I suspect that living 24/7 in workout attire is the clothing version of the messy topknot. We all know that your hair is dirty, or too long, or too frizzy, or your roots have grown out, but we are all going to accept it as fabulous because that's the deal.

Even as a 10-year-old, I remember trying to explain to my mother and stepfather how upset and frustrated a messy room made me. But they just couldn't grasp it. They wanted me to be playing with baseballs and frogs while I wanted to be scouring garage sales.

As a feminist, just to speak to what women go through, I think women are put in a box way too often. What I love about 'You're the Worst' is that no female character is portrayed as a black-and-white cartoon character. We're all complicated, messy human beings.

The more messy women that we put on screen, that we put in books, the more women can feel represented and seen, then they can access their own stuff, feel it's okay, and then have the strength to speak out about things like we're talking about. About rising up.

Schoolkids - black and white - would call me Kunta Kinte as a cuss. If ever my hair was particularly messy, if ever I looked scruffy at school, I would be called Kunta Kinte. My first impression was that it was bad to be African and bad to be associated with him.

The key thing in my becoming a writer was going on a Arvon Foundation residential writing course. I took with me a really messy twenty thousand words of something that later became After You'd Gone, my first novel. My tutors were Barbara Trapido and Elspeth Barker.

I usually work in a room which is totally cluttered with my mess, and there's stuff everywhere, and it's kind of chaotic because I am a very messy person. I could totally write in a pristine environment, but it would mean I would have to be at someone else's house.

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.

I think showing people being messy and showing them being wrong and showing them in their humanity is something that we can do, but it becomes difficult because there's this weight put on comedy to be part of change and I'm like, 'I don't think it changes anything.'

Even though I'm usually not conscious of it, I think drawing has always served a sort of therapeutic purpose in my life. There's something about the process of translating the messy chaos of real life into a clean, simple drawing that's always been comforting to me.

I've always believed that pastry chefs are born, not made. They're patient, methodical, tidy, and organized. It's why I stick to the savory side of the kitchen - I'm far too messy and impulsive to do all the measuring, timing, and rule-following that pastry demands.

The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy.

In petrol stations on the motorways where people have left the place looking messy, I clear up each lavatory I happen to have occupied. When people drop paper on the ground, and everything like that, I pick it up, put it in the lavatory, and make that room look nice.

The United States and its European allies need to start viewing foreign assistance to some messy and unsavory regions of the world as investments in our collective future rather than charity; we're paying money now so that we don't have to pay with blood and treasure later.

I'm trying to be more put-together. My closets are very messy. I like Rebecca Minkoff; her clothes are casual, but cool. I love Band of Outsiders. And ASOS makes a lot of good stuff. I can get lost on their website for hours. I don't like to spend a lot of money on clothes.

In the real world, answers may not be clear cut. There will be messy choices, and you're not going to be able to construct a policy response in a neat and tidy way. Being able to listen to other people, even as you stay true to your principles, that's how you actually succeed.

Truth be told, I hear stories every day that would make you say, 'If you put that in a movie, you wouldn't believe it.' Real life really is kinda incredible; the stories from people's actual lives defy credibility. People's lives are messy, humans are messy, and they're flawed.

Not only have individual politicians and celebrities personally condemned your automobiles for being too messy, noisy, and harmful to the common good, but they've tried to affect the natural market through taxes on larger vehicles along with incentives and quotas for 'greener' cars.

I confess that I am a messy, disorganized and impatient reader: if the book doesn't grab me in the first 40 pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me to rest so that I could read more.

The history of the Internet is not, as some people have tried to make it, a libertarian just-so story. It is a messy tale in which the government played a significant role. That role was, however, far more subtle than the plans of industrial policy gurus or techno-boosting politicians.

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