Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.
There ain't any news in being good. You might write the doings of all the convents of the world on the back of a postage stamp, and have room to spare.
I get a lot of fan mail from girls. It's interesting because it's not just the U.S. - you get things from people all over the world. They send these postage stamps and you're like, 'Where do you live?' It's crazy. I'll get letters from the troops, too.
Well, I know that I'll never forget that, but also I won't forget the hundreds of people who sent me letters, telegrams, and postcards during that World Series. There wasn't a single nasty message. Everybody tried to say something nice.
I have a study at the back of the house, overlooking our garden. It's tiny, just wide enough to fit my desk in. The walls are covered with pin boards and art postcards from galleries all over the world, including Tate, MoMA, and Lenbachhaus.
This at least should be a rule through the letter-writing world: that no angry letter be posted till four-and-twenty hours will have elapsed since it was written.
I'm a poster child for Luddites. It was a challenge for me to open myself up the tech world.
Give consideration to the fact that alien astronomers could have scrutinized Earth for more than 4 billion years without detecting any radio signals, despite the fact that our world is the poster child for habitability.
Everybody's got their phone up and everybody's taking recordings and posting it on YouTube and whatever and sending it to you, and it gets shown around the world.
I worked in factories, slaughterhouses, as an upholsterer. I did demolition work, was a postman, was a tiler, a plasterer. I even sold double-glazing door-to-door. But I always dreamed of being a world champion, first of all as a boxer.
The measure of success was writing a song, recording it and for it being in the hit parade in England. Success was about the postman walking up the garden whistling my song. I wasn't trying to conquer the world.
The deconstructed, postmodern pizza has been with us for ages, and the fact is that pretty much every ingredient in the world has been used as a pizza topping and liked by somebody, somewhere.
I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.
Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.
I'm in charge of the State Department's 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts.
Shoes define how you walk in the world and how you stand: like, what is your posture in life?
The high-tech, globalized capitalism of the 21st century is very different from the postwar version of capitalism that performed so magnificently for the middle classes of the Western world.
Look at what left-wing movements were like in the 19th century - they were all about progress, the engineering of the world, the reshaping of nature, and so on. It's only postwar, really, that people on the left have come to see the environment as a critical issue.
Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.
I learned how to navigate the world, and life's potholes, in Pittsburgh.
