The way I think liberties get eroded is not that all of a sudden you become an Orwellian state, but gradually it becomes harder for people with unpopular views to speak out without being in danger, be it from the state or just from the majority of the people who don't like them.
Eros is very close to death. And both things, in a way, balance each other.
I do know that homelessness is related to housing, and we haven't been producing housing in the numbers that our community requires - a lot of the escalating costs of housing is related to the fact that supply is way short than demand.
The press doesn't stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.
Singing is a way of escaping. It's another world. I'm no longer on earth.
Like with all the Arabs, they use the 'suspect procedure' on me. I arrive four hours before the flight. They do a body search in a back room behind the curtain and then escort me onto the plane because they're afraid that on the way I might pick up a bomb from someone.
I want people in their 20s to think of 'Swing' the way a generation in the 1960s thought of 'Esquire' - as the voice of young thinkers.
I didn't really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.
I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.
Vidal was a novelist, an essayist, a playwright, a screenwriter, and many other things. Buckley started a magazine, hosted a TV show, lead a political movement, and was a master debater. They were multihyphenates in a way that you rarely see anymore.
Everyone is taught the essentials of writing for at least 13 years, maybe more if they go to college. Nobody is taught music or tap dancing that way.
I get travel-sized versions of all of my essentials. That way, I can stay on the same routine whether I'm home or on the road.
One change always leaves the way open for the establishment of others.
We want to get 80%-85% of predictions right, not 100%. Or else we calibrated our estimates in the wrong way.
Estimates are that at least 70 per cent of all stars are accompanied by planets, and since the latter can occur in systems rather than as individuals (think of our own solar system), the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy is of order one trillion.
Keeping the pen out of your hand as much as possible is the best way to write a song, in my estimation. But the pen must come in to tighten it up.
The fact that Skype was founded in Estonia, the fact that Skype had a successful exit, which meant that Estonia benefited in a major way, meant that entrepreneurship became legitimate. There were more than a thousand people who either worked or had worked at Skype who had seen what it takes to build a global business.
The longing for peace is rooted in the hearts of all men. But the striving, which at present has become so insistent, cannot lay claim to such an ambition as leading the way to eternal peace, or solving all disputes among nations.
This is my work ethic: I do not want to raise my future kids where I was raised, and I know the only way to do it is working, working, working, working, working.
I think Scotland could take a stand in a wonderful way, ecologically and morally and ethically.
