It's not about the past; it's about knowing your history so that you can fight in the present. Otherwise, you don't know who the real enemy is, what the real issue is, because it had been covered by many layers of bad information, of lies, and manipulation.
Real freedom is creative, proactive, and will take me into new territories. I am not free if my freedom is predicated on reacting to my past.
Some people have issues in their past that might make them tweak out at certain moments, but it's possible to snap back and be a real human being.
It has become much more difficult to smuggle dangerous substances across our borders over the past three years, and this is creating real problems for drug traffickers.
Any Human Rights Council reform that allows countries that sponsor terrorism to remain as members, such as Cuba, is not real reform. And in the past, countries such as Libya, Iran and Syria have participated on this council.
It took me a really long time to get past all of that internalized dissociation with being female that I was being given by media.
My life is like driving down a road. I occasionally glance in the rearview mirror, but I'm not focused on the past or looking back anymore.
At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.
I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.
Young fighters dream of the future. Old fighters seek to recapture the past.
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.
There's nothing in the recent past I want to write about.
The economic and social decline of Zimbabwe is shocking and appalling. Life there is unrecognisable from that of the recent past. Each day is a struggle for basic survival.
As an entrepreneur and employer, in the fairly recent past I have been astonished at how difficult it has been to get young people to take the idea of getting a job seriously.
Almost the first thing Obama did in the White House was to return the bust of Winston Churchill to the British embassy. That suggests a major re-ordering of things. It'll be fascinating to see what happens from now on. It was a genuine break with the recent past - perhaps to re-connect with the past past.
When I say I hate nostalgia, I hate things set in the recent past where everything is shiny and new.
I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.
I'm a feminist. The women in my books in recent years have been powerful characters and I love to see a woman with a cute bottom walking past.
Eating vegetarian in the past would have been a really bad choice as an athlete. Impossible. Just being able to get the amount of protein in was a mission. You couldn't be picky. I feel quite liberated by the fact that I can now quite recklessly choose vegetarian food.
If you find great difficulty in trying to reckon with the future or even the present, I think it's intuitive to start that process by reckoning with the past.
