Every time in this century we've lowered the tax rates across the board, on employment, on saving, investment and risk-taking in this economy, revenues went up, not down.
As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down.
I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.
Teenage girls these days are more and more getting lured into thinking they should dumb themselves down, and that's going to attract the wrong kind of guy, and it's serious. It's serious business.
I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.
Sumatra has these lush forests and huge, amazing creatures like elephants, orangutans, and tigers. They're disappearing because of industry coming in and cutting down the forests.
For me, the movies I like are all independent. And getting an independent feature made, it's like you get down to the selling organs part, and it just loses some of its luster.
When we are out on the road, running up and down the road playing shows, you have to be not only a member of a band but, especially with Lynyrd Skynyrd, you have to be a part of the Skynyrd nation. You have to be a part of the family.
If you could sit down with Jesus, you wouldn't need anybody else. He could answer all of your questions. Instead of Einstein and Louis Pasteur and Madame Curry, you could just have Jesus and he could answer for all of them.
If I'm walking very, very fast down Madison Avenue in the middle of the day, I'll say I'm stopped 10 times.
At North Hollywood High School, I was shunned by everyone. I would sit down in the cafeteria, and students would get up from the table and walk away. They thought I was from the Mafia.
I used to look down on the world for being corrupt, but now I adore it for the utter magnificence of that corruption.
Stand-up comedy is a lot about amplifying emotions and situations; movie acting has a lot to do with mellowing things down and making them subtle. The transition was almost terrifying because of the magnitude of change.
I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.
The best example of how impossible it will be for Major League Baseball to crack down on steroids is the fact that baseball and the media are still talking about the problem as 'steroids.'
If you sit down with British officers or British senior NCOs, they understand the sweep of history. They know the history of British forces not just in Afghanistan but the history of British successful counter-insurgencies - Northern Ireland, Malaysia.
I'm based here in L.A., but I think in the future I might consider settling down in Malaysia when I start a family.
The contentious issue of pay parity between male and female actors is easily resolvable if a number of big actresses decide to put their foot down. But we have to also consider the factors of time and labour. If a female actor has shot only for 40 days and the male actor for 200 days, she cannot expect to be paid the same amount.
What happens when corn and wheat prices rise is that we see real increases in malnutrition and under-nutrition. And when children are malnourished, their brain development actually slows down and is affected. So this is not just a short-term impact.
I really connect with those moments of doing missionary work down there and just seeing the people that are dying from disease and hunger and malnutrition.
