I'm mostly known for writing electro and aggressive bangery house music. But before I started making electro, and while I was making electro, this sort of gushy, make-the-ravers-cry sort of sentimentality is so important to me.

You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.

When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in American medical magazines and textbooks, I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor.

The comics I read as a kid were much more influenced by TV and movies. Encountering superheroes as an adult without that kind of childhood sentimentality, it just doesn't allow you, or in my case at least, it wouldn't let me take the characters seriously.

I'm not concerned that my stuff isn't extreme. I don't want to be heavy. I can't think of another attitude to have toward an audience than a hopeful and a positive one. And if that includes such unfashionable things as sentimentality, well, I can afford it.

I haven't changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That's what modernism means to me.

From time to time there is a move to do a little less in the way of period dramas, but people rebel. Audiences say we want them. There is a big hunger for them. I don't think it's sentimentality or nostalgia, it's often that they are simply the best stories.

The sentimentality that people see and hear in my commentary and sometimes ridicule, parody or just don't like - that's okay. We're all wired differently. I think about that a lot. I can't explain it. That's just what runs through my blood. It's just the way I look at the world.

Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money.

Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery, the feeling of righteous anger, the feelings of pathos and sadness, or sentimentality of being moved by something.

The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch.

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.

On occasion, I like to reread my grandfather's letters. While leafing through them, I'm saddened by what is being lost in modern communication. Soul-baring sentimentality isn't typically poured into text messages, tweets and emails. All too often, personal connections are brushed aside for the sake of convenience in a fast-paced world.

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