Up Quotes
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I got to grow up with a mother who taught me to believe in me.
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Make no mistake: I do not valorize our military out of some unfamiliar instinct. I grew up in a military family, and have my own record of service, and have stayed closely engaged with our armed forces throughout my public career. In the American system, the military has value only inasmuch as it protects and defends the liberties of the people.
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It's become something of a ritual - every year, Google publishes its year-end summary of what the world wants, and every year I complain about how shallow it is, given what Google really knows about what the world is up to.
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Since periods of great change, such as the present one, come so rarely in human history, it is up to each of us to make the best use of our time to help create a happier world.
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My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music.
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So many of the bands that influenced me growing up were English, even if I didn't realise it. English pop ruled the world in the '80s!
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I kind of keep my personality in my pocket a lot. When I start to do stand-up, that's not my true personality either. It's the personality of a guy who hasn't been able to say what he wanted to say.
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There are people out there dying every day, so when you wake up, you just have to thank the Man Upstairs for another day on this planet. There's not much else we can ask for.
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The best thing about animated-feature people is that they are very laid-back people. You feel like you're showing up for a backyard barbecue.
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John F.Kennedy gave probably the greatest inauguration speech ever that first time, but I guarantee you when he first walked out there he was thinking, "Goodness gracious this is big and I better be up to the task."
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We are always taking a hard look at how life was in the past in coming up with interesting subject matter for our various series, and remembering how much I used to want an encyclopedia as a kid made me realize wanting a set is very unlikely for teens today, and that conversation would be interesting.
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To me, it felt that if I give up my name, I am also sending a message to my children, saying my name was not important enough as your father's; I am not as important as your father. That is a message we are passing down generation after generation without realising.
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Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.
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I hate flying, airports and the whole rigmarole - queuing up, security and lost luggage.
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If we got there and we looked up and we said, "You know what? Black folks are still doing a little bit worse off than whites, but it's not like it was 20 years ago," then we can have a discussion about how do we get that last little bit. But that's a high-class problem to have.
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The Home Guards are required to come in at once and deliver up their arms, those who fail to do so will be regarded as enemies of the Government and treated accordingly.
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A campaign gives you focus. You wake up to a different hotel alarm clock every day, but you know your mission.
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I don't like doing things by halves, and I realised you can't do stand-up comedy part-time.
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As a rule, wearing a bigger pair of jeans looks better than squishing yourself into a pair of jeans that used to fit before you gave up smoking.
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I'm very fond of Glasgow, particularly the West End. The whole stretch of the west coast of Scotland from Loch Lomond up through Mallaig to the Kyle of Localsh is so beautiful.
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It's one thing I like about America - they respect the sportsman. They put them up on a pedestal. They don't try to knock them down. And that's a great thing, to be respected by the whole country. It's so patriotic!
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I tried to write about my first marriage in a fictional version but got two pages into it and realised it was too personal. Then I came up with an old-fashioned love triangle, which became the plot for 'Ralph's Party.'
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The mechanic could lift up the bonnet of the car and show me four dwarves strapped to a pair of tandems and tell me that the motor was actually dwarf-powered and that one of the little fellows had to be replaced, and I'd just be numbly writing out a cheque and scribbling 'new dwarf - car' on the stub.
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A bunch of chairs lined up in front of a podium equals school.
