Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happenng, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place.

When I was 12 years old, I was just horrible. My parents were ashamed to watch my matches. I would play on a court at the local club and they would watch from the balcony. They would scream, 'Be quiet' to me and I would scream back, 'Go and have a drink. Leave me alone.' Then we would drive home in a very quiet car. No one speaking to each other.

When I started swimming again two years ago, it felt like I was starting from scratch. My mind-set was [to tell myself that] every time I swam, it was going to get easier-and it did. When you're working toward a fitness goal, you just need to start. It's not going to be pretty, your body is going to scream at you, but each time you'll get better.

I speak to kids 16, 17 years old, they haven't read a newspaper. They haven't physically handled a newspaper. They don't even look at the headlines on a subway. These kids are on the Internet and the level of news that they're getting is not the quality of 'The New York Times' or 'The Wall Street Journal.' It's way deficient, and they don't care.

I do not know whether the Government will be able to get ready to conduct this transaction together with the management of Rosneft itself, whether the appropriate strategic investors will be found. And I believe it is about such investors that we should talk. But we are getting ready, and it is in the current year that we are planning to do this.

When I was writing Dune there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book's success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced.

I've been meeting with Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino for years, trying to figure out how to fix the concert industry. We're all so overpaid. It's ridiculous. People stopped going to concerts because they can't afford them. The Rolling Stones are charging $650 per ticket! That just makes me speechless. I love the Stones, but I won't be attending.

I think I'm definitely more open. You know the thing is I wouldn't have said I was closed before, but like, it's the kind of thing that you don't even think of other options. I've been dating black men for really, for like, I don't know, 10 years. You know, I haven't really dated outside of that. Now I think I'm probably am more open to the idea.

If you don't feel challenged, it's because you're not doing enough. Ballet should never feel comfortable. Comfortable is lazy! If you're comfortable when you dance, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. 100 % is not enough. You have to give 200%. One tendu takes years of hard work and will never be perfect. Everything in ballet is a challenge.

I only had a three-week break from the beginning of Bent, so I went from one thing to the next. I got back [from shooting Jack Reacher] and there was a sense of, "Oh my God, what do I do now?" I don't have personal trainers around me all the time, I'm not on a meal plan, which I had been on for almost a year straight. There was a lot of sleeping.

Years ago, while being in an airport in Australia, I happened to meet with David Helfgott. I knew that he was a bit fond of me and I was personally a fan of him. We were so happy to meet and hug and we had a very warm conversation together. Since that time.... about 20 years ago, I have not meet him again. I think that he is a very good pianist !

You probably think Italians like meals with heavy meats and sauces, but they actually prefer light meats. They see turkey as a healthy, light white meat that lends itself excellently to their style of cooking, and they use it in many different ways. Also, Europeans do not celebrate Thanksgiving so they perceive turkey as an all-year round option.

I was influenced at an early age by Gandhi, and I have read many biographies of him. I have been greatly influenced in the last twenty years by Mandela. It is amazing that he has managed to keep such a balance, that he came out of prison after such a long time as a rounded, holistic person who could reach difficult accommodations with generosity.

Today a great shot for freedom was heard. I think it stands a chance of being heard forever. It marls a turning point in the history of the Jewish people. The beginning of the return to a statues of dignity we have not known for two thousand years. Yes, today was the first step back. My battle is done. Now I turn the command over to the soldiers.

I don't understand how people can stand next to you one year,and next year, they cannot. They're going crazy, screaming. They can't take it that you're there. But last year I was in the same club,walking around,lonely like a motherfucker. Couldn't get a date or a dance. I was too skinny, too something, and now, "He's just adorable. He's just, oh!

In those years, when I came to the States, people were always asking me why I didn't sing anymore. I'd tell them, 'I sing all around the world-Asia, Africa, Europe-but if you don't sing in the US, then you haven't really made it.' That's why I'll always be grateful to Paul Simon. He allowed me to bring my music back to my friends in this country.

David Foster Wallace is a big idol of mine. His writing is so clear that for years I'd read him and think, My God, he is actually writing the way I think. He's describing the thoughts in my head. And then I realized, No, wait. He's just such a good writer, so transparent and articulate, that when he describes his thoughts, I think they're my own.

A large percentage of those living in developed societies are told what brand of soda they should drink, what cigarettes they should smoke, what clothes and shoes they should wear, what they should eat and what brand of food they should buy. Their political ideas are supplied in the same way. Every year a trillion dollars is spent on advertising.

You can slow time down by traveling. That month from Shringar to the Taj Mahal is like a year in my life currently. Really, time is a measure of change, in a vacuum time doesn't exist because nothing's changing. If you can pack your life full of interesting changes you stretch it out. So if you want to live longer, have a really interesting life.

I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know.

To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life: each individual a free man; each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which the people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost.

For instance, let us say that a new stock has been listed in the last two or three years and its high was 20, or any other figure, and that such a price was made two or three years ago. If something favorable happens in connection with the company, and the stock starts upward, usually it is safe play to buy the minute it touches a brand new high.

I remember during the 1970 World Cup, the whole country stopped to focus on the matches. I was nine years old. I would sit in front of the radio with my father, and we would listen to the magic of football. It was like the matches were a dramatic story being told to us. It was a kind of art, in my opinion. It was like a painting or a great novel.

On average, once a month for the last 10 years since her [Harper Lee] stroke, we have sat and talked and told stories and exchanged insults... Which she loves. I think one secret to our friendship was I did not treat her like a marble woman, and my wife - I joked with her, and I joked with her, and that was the sort of contours of our friendship.

Ranieri? He's right in what he says: I am very demanding of myself and I need to win to be secure about things. That's why I've won so many trophies in my career. He, on the other hand, has the mentality of someone who doesn't need to win and at nearly 70 years old he has won a Supercoppa and another small cup. He's too old to change his mindset.

I still oppose "Visit Myanmar Year," and I would ask tourists to stay away. Burma is not going to run away. They should come back to Burma at a time when it is a democratic society where people are secure - where there is justice, where there is rule of law. They'll have a much better time. And they can travel around Burma with a clear conscience.

Over the course of more than 200 years, it has found a right to equal education regardless of race. It has guaranteed an attorney and a fair trial to all Americans, rich and poor alike. It has allowed women to keep private medical decisions private. And it has allowed Americans to speak, vote and worship without interference from their government.

I am flattered that Bob Carter should ask me to launch what I think is a significant new book on climate change. I have developed a very high regard for Bob in the years that I have known him. He has been a terrific and leading voice in combatting the scare mongering that we have all been subjected to on the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

I'm worried about privacy because of the young people who don't give a damn about their privacy, who are prepared to put their entire private lives online. They put stuff on Facebook that 15 years from now will prevent them from getting the jobs they want. They don't understand that they are mortgaging their future for a quick laugh from a friend.

I feel like there's no reason to put myself through what I put myself through for 20-something years on airplanes, especially these days. You don't know whether your pilot is going to drop dead over the ocean; you don't know when you try to land whether the wheels are going to come down; you can be searched and seized and detained and quarantined.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

People never grasp the fact that they're going to have to go through the same thing again. They get to the sort of five-year stretch or the seven-year itch or whatever these tension points are that seem to be organic, built in, like the tide coming in and going out. It's like every time the tide goes out you quit--you move your house or something.

Back in 1792, Dr. Benjamin Banneker, the famed African-American inventor and scientist in Washington, proposed a Department of Peace for the new Nation to his friends George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. His prophetic suggestion was not implemented; but now, more than 200 years later, the need for a Peace Department is too compelling to ignore.

The United Nations four or five years ago put out a study that said the meat industry, meat-eating, growing meat for food is the No. 1 killer of our planet - not No. 2 or No. 3: No 1. You know what’s No. 2? Transportation. Everyone thinks that No. 1 is transportation, and goes out and buys a hybrid car. Screw the hybrid cars. Don’t eat hamburgers.

the other guineahen died of a broken heart and we came to New York. I used to sit at a table,drawing wings with a pencil that kept breaking and i kept remembering how your mind looked when it slept for several years,to wake up asking why. So then you turned into a photograph of somebody who’s trying not to laugh at somebody who’s trying not to cry

This is a president [Barack Obama] who came into office in 2008 with a big majority in the House and with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Because of his policies and his conduct in office, seven years later, we have our largest majority in the House since 1928, and we have a majority in the Senate and we have 31 of the 60 governorships.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I ever expect to see.

For me, Corsica is a place that I visited with my friends, maybe five or six times over the years, and I'm so happy there that I wanted to make a painting about it almost just to share with my friends, but it's so difficult when all your feelings are one way, and they're very sort of happy and pleasant. It's impossible to make a painting about it.

I knew that I wanted to pursue acting as a profession during my sophomore year of college. One of my Professors (Karen Deacons-Brock) at N.C Central University assigned me to perform a one woman show for my final project and it was then, along with her encouragement, that it was time for me to move to NY in pursuit of a professional acting career.

I'm never overawed by a situation and I think that's because I've always looked several years older than I am. So because people were treating me like I was 40 when I was 29, I've always felt in control of a situation. People used to say, when you're 32, you'll look 32. I'm still waiting for that moment, where my age catches up with my appearance.

In issues of recent ethnic wars and genocides - particularly if you look at Darfur - one of the most remarkable things is our inability to act, still, despite the years of analyzing and re-analyzing what it does to subsequent generations. We still find a massive inability to step in and step up to the plate, when genocide is happening as we speak.

A lot of people do things out of fear. A lot of people make choices, based on thinking, they won’t have a career in five years. I know where I am, I know what I do is worth something and does not have an expiration date on it. I’m not making choices — in any capacity of my life, with any kind of endorsement, with any kind of product — out of fear.

Werner Herzog, I knew him for so many years, when Fassbinder was at his highest moment. But we had a rule: An actor from Fassbinder could never work with an actor of Werner Herzog or Wim Wenders. Because if we would have done that, we would have been spies. "Ah, you worked with Werner - how was it? How did he direct you?" I was Fassbinder's actor.

The cliche of the nerdy kid who doesn't go outside and just plays games is completely untrue. And it's also true for the nerdy kid who studies comic books and turns into this genius, and it is also true for the nerdy kid who listens to every nerdy thing that Led Zeppelin put out. That kind of obsession in a 16-year-old is not ugly. It's beautiful.

There's a lot of differing data [about global warming], but as far as I can gather, over the last hundred years the temperature on this planet has gone up 1.8 degrees. Am I the only one who finds that amazingly stable? I could go back to my hotel room tonight and futz with the thermostat for three to four hours. I could not detect that difference.

The Bush administration has been doing everything it can to hide the huge number of returning veterans who are severely wounded - 17,000 so far including roughly 20 percent with serious brain and head injuries. Even the estimate of $500 billion ignores the lifetime disability and healthcare costs that taxpayers will have to spend for years to come.

What does surprise me, though, is the amount of attention this band [Guns'n'Roses] has garnered 11 years after the original lineup broke up. That's an interesting phenomenon. It was even interesting back in the day. I mean, [we were] this glorified garage band. It was a great band, but it was not the kind of band you expected to become what it has.

Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody's existence on this planet? Clearly we don't really think they should be blown up, that's just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?

Science is constantly proved all the time. If we take something like any fiction, any holy book, and destroyed it, in a thousand years' time, that wouldn't come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they'd all be back because all the same tests would be the same result.

When the Egyptians were building the pyramids or the Romans were building roads, or you had the westward push with the railroads, I don't think that the guys on the ground were spending a lot of time thinking, 'Hey, hundreds or thousands of years from now they will look back at the brick I have just laid down here and say that I changed the world!'

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