The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.

It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists - Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.

I love the sensation of being out in the open air, far away from all the distractions of modern life. I will usually disappear for a couple of hours, and that time on my bike is quite sacred, as it's when I do all my serious thinking. Sometimes I will stop off at bikers' cafe and have a bacon sandwich.

We needed to make a sound that's not gonna fit in with everything else - we wanted to make something that was completely unique and individual to us. We spent a lot of time trying to make a sound that was a One Direction sound. At first it was quite hard to do that, but I'm really happy with the sound.

I quite like that people tend not to know my name. I remember being at the Cannes film festival for 'All or Nothing.' I looked very different in the film - I had a little greasy bob and no makeup. I went to a dinner after the screening, and everyone completely ignored me. I got a real buzz out of that.

The most difficult thing about painting is the self-discipline. When I finish a job, I give myself a few days, but then I have to discipline myself quite fiercely if I want to do some painting that's worthwhile. Otherwise, you're just doodling. It's much easier when you're just told what you have to do.

I'm not a blokey bloke. I don't take myself too seriously. But that doesn't stop me being a bad person sometimes and doing things I regret. Such as having a child with someone you've split up with, then falling in love and wanting to spend the rest of your life with someone else. That's quite difficult.

Ultimately, I'm in the fitness industry. But, I've branched out from there quite a bit. I began doing consulting on writing and getting published in magazines in about 2011. Right around that time, I started doing some angel investing and looking to grow my skills and general experience outside of that.

Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.

I would say that engineering has been a very positive experience overall, but usually coming into the situation it would be one of being underestimated. People would actually have low expectations. But I would take advantage of it quite honestly, because I would take my time to underestimate the situation.

The vast majority of the online crime cases, we don't even know which continent the attacks are coming from. And even if we are able to find online criminals, quite often there is no outcome. The local police don't act, or if they do, there's not enough evidence, or for some reason we can't take them down.

The biggest change we have to tackle that's out there is that we're digging the hole deeper and deeper and spending is totally out of control. And that's something that, quite frankly, is affecting future generations. You're giving a lot of debt to them and you can't keep doing it. It's not helping anybody.

Maori get pigeonholed into the idea they're spiritual and telling stories like 'Whale Rider' and 'Once Were Warriors,' quite serious stuff, but we're pretty funny people, and we never really have had an opportunity to show that side of ourselves, the clumsy, nerdy side of ourselves, which is something I am.

A sponge is quite simple. You weigh ingredients, mix, and put it in the oven. With pastry, you manhandle it, shape it, fold it. You have to be involved with it; there is more jeopardy, more risk. But it's like making a casserole. There's a flurry of activity to begin with; then it's about leaving it to rest.

New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party - usually at a gathering in a home - where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.

I brought Muhammad Ali to North Korea in 1995. I tried that once. It didn't work out quite that well for me as it did for Dennis Rodman, but I brought Muhammad Ali to Pyongyang, North Korea, as part of a big wrestling event called the World Peace Festival. It was a two-day event that drew over 350,000 people.

Strangely enough, when the Sugababes' 'Freak Like Me' went to number 1, which was built around my 'Are 'Friends' Electric' song, I had another song called 'Rip' go to number 1 in the Kerrang TV chart, so I was pulling new people in from very different areas of musical interest. That was quite an amazing week.

Having children is the greatest thing that can happen to you as a husband and wife. They are infuriating at times when they're little, but on the whole, they're such a joy. I don't think I was the most brilliant mother when they were young. I had quite a bit of help because I was working and I enjoyed my work.

It is that kind of space, that little space of longing, whether it is in something like romantic love, or whether it's in something like divine love. You know, that kind of search for something that's not quite in your grasp. It's a very powerful place to explore as an artist, because it's not necessarily sad.

The most overrated ingredients are garlic and extra-virgin olive oil. With garlic, it's personal; I have never been that big of a fan of its flavor. As for extra-virgin olive oil, I do use it quite often but its ubiquity serves to overshadow many wonderful oils like pistachio, walnut, argan and even grapeseed.

Originally, I thought the story of the Alamo was all these men defending their liberty when they could have left, knowing they were going to die. That's without a doubt what appealed to me, the romance and the nobility. But, as in life, the more you dig the more you find out that things weren't quite like that.

Corruption in Saudi Arabia is quite different from corruption in most other countries, as it is not limited to a 'bribe' in return for a contract, or expensive gift for the family member of a government official or prince, or use of a private jet that is charged to the government so a family can go on vacation.

Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music. William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician. All of his poems are all like songs, and that's how I always try to start my thoughts.

I lead a very active lifestyle. When I am not working, I enjoy snowboarding in winter. I golf and swim in the summer months. However, trying to find the time to exercise when I am traveling is quite a challenge. I find myself working out at hotel gyms quite regularly - just so that I can keep up with my training.

I, as prime minister, never went to Washington. Certainly never went to a presidential ranch. I hate to say this, but I wasn't going to be the pilot fish to the shark, whereas Australia quite happily bobbed along like a happy little pilot fish with a shark who was a messy eater, and I just couldn't feel like that.

People I respect complimenting me on my work in fashion is more exciting to me than anything I ever achieved as a Spice Girl. I am now competing in an arena where I can hold my head high. I feel quite confident in what I'm doing now, much more than the singing. I was never going to give Mariah Carey any competition.

Anybody out there who has had a situation where they've had to struggle - when they want something so badly, but they can't quite get it - I am living and breathing proof that if you endure, if you push yourself, if you strive to be your best, no matter what, if you keep on working hard, then good things can happen.

I was drafted by the New Orleans Saints, and quite frankly, I got worn out playing football. I got tired of it. With wrestling, there were so many variables that could go with it, so many directions you could go. Every night, it was different. Every night. It was a different town 7 nights a week and twice on Sunday.

I've been hitting up Hooters since 1983, and I can assure you nothin' says football season is here quite like watching the game on wall-to-wall flat screen TVs with the smell of Hooters world-famous chicken wings in the air and an ice-cold beer in your hand, served up with one-and-only Hooters hospitality, of course.

I feel that every day, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless; it literally pours in.

For every successful actor or actress, there are countless numbers who don't make it. The name of the game is rejection. You go to an audition and you're told you're too tall or you're too Irish or your nose is not quite right. You're rejected for your education, you're rejected for this or that and it's really tough.

My friendships all tend to be quite steady, so it's really hard to novelise that stuff because it's just boring. I mean, there's interesting conversations, but there's no power struggle. And you can't work with equilibrium; you have to work with something that's just off and then observe how it tries to correct itself.

The Founders recognized that Government is quite literally a necessary evil, that there must be opposition, between its various branches, and between political parties, for these are the only ways to temper the individual's greed for power and the electorates' desires for peace by submission to coercion or blandishment.

I had two starts, really. The first was going to the Italia Conti stage school, aged 15. I'd gone to sing, but one day I found myself doing an improvisation and thought, 'Oh God, I quite like this acting thing.' The second start was meeting Mike Leigh when I was 22. He showed me I could play people that weren't like me.

'Star Trek' fans totally accepted my sexual orientation. There are a great number of LGBT people across 'Star Trek' fandom. The show always appealed to people that were different - the geeks and the nerds, and the people who felt they were not quite a part of society, sometimes because they may have been gay or lesbian.

Quite frankly, I think political correctness is the worst form of censorship. You're not allowed to speak your mind unless you're black, or unless you're a terrorist, or unless you're an Arab or a minority people. Then you can say what you like. But if you are like a lot of us you are not supposed to say certain things.

I worked with Michael Black and Michael Showalter on their show 'Michael and Michael Have Issues.' We did some stuff on that, but it ended up not getting picked up for a second season. There will be more stuff, but not right now. Michael Showalter and I are literally next-door neighbors. We see quite a lot of each other.

I remember that it was never that difficult for me to get a director to look up and pay attention to me. Mind you, I don't know if that's necessarily charm. But I've played roles where my character has to be charming and I've found it quite easy to do. I think some of it is in my bones, but some of it is more deliberate.

If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive.

I'm an Australian. And I'm speaking generally here, but Australians in general aren't patriotic or nationalistic. Our country was built by immigrants. So, by my experience, I've seen the way immigration has transformed nations. They are the key people who quite literally build civilizations, be it culturally or musically.

In Ireland here, the Revenue Commission have always been completely independent of the state since 1923, and they are quite adamant and quite clear that there was no preferential treatment and no special deals, no sweetheart deals, and that Apple paid the taxes that were due on their profits generated here in this country.

As far as sleeping goes, you're up and ready to go at six in the morning. Spring training was always a combination of relaxing and working, and I missed that quite a bit. I missed being around the ball field. A baseball. A bat. The smell of the uniform, you might say. Talking baseball. Seeing opponents as well as the Cubs.

'Southern Accents,' I think that's one of my best, really. That would have been 1984, and I wrote that on the piano in the studio at home. I had a studio, and I just happened to be down there in the middle of the night. It was quite late, probably early morning, and I just started to play, and a song just started to appear.

The music of ABBA is not that happy. It might sound happy, in some strange way, but deep within, it's not happy music. It has that Nordic melancholic feeling to it. What fools you is the girls' voices. You know, I do think that is one of the secrets about ABBA. Even when we were really quite sad, we always sounded jubilant.

That result at the French was a big break for me. I had been playing quite well up until that point but nobody really expected me to do well on clay - it was my worst surface. I had had some success on the clay but I was a set and a break up in the semi-final against Jausovec and maybe the enormity of the occasion got to me.

Filming costs so much money, so it's such a nerve-racking process, whereas being in a studio is quite cheap compared to that, so you have more time to work on things until you feel good about them. That makes it easier to explain a certain feeling and be in a vulnerable place while making sure it does what you want it to do.

I do mostly Southern landscapes. I do beautiful old barns that are falling down, and beautiful trees reflecting in the water. My lovely wife Dorothy and I travel quite a bit, so I take pictures of different things that inspire me to come home, when I come home here in North Carolina, into my art studio and paint these things.

Lyrics came quite easy early on in my career. But I always wanted to push it further and stand out a bit more. We were coming from the garage era when lyrics were simplified, purposefully, to work in the club environment. They were about hyping up a crowd or bigging up a DJ. Moving into grime, our lyrics became more in-depth.

Over the years, I've discovered that lessons in cooking come in two forms. There are the lessons that you never fully learn; skills that you get better and better at, but never quite perfect. Then there are the lessons that you only need to learn once because the results of not following them will literally scar you for life.

I never have more than one bag at a time. I think one is already quite enough. Also, I hate changing bags, so I never have the thing of having ten bags. Any bag that's with me will take the same course as I will. It will take the same airplanes and will be squashed in the same way and will be used as a cushion in the airports.

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