Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was one of the more talented ones at the design firm I joined, so I conducted my work pretty shrewdly. Except I wasn't a morning person, so I was quite frequently late for work. On top of that, it was a fairly big company, they were fussy about the dress code, and I got chewed out quite often.
The right to strike is one of the most important safeguards working people have in this country. It's a weapon of last resort that has served throughout history as a bargaining tool which allows unions to push for recognition of ordinary workers' rights to be paid fairly and treated with dignity.
I was a big party guy in my twenties, and kind of a playboy as well. I adopted a lot of values and goals that were fairly superficial and, in many cases, self-destructive. They looked cool and sounded sexy on the surface, but underneath, there was no real meaning going on, just a lot of escapism.
As anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, I'm fairly robust in my views on there. I get next to nothing in the way of trolling. Most women I know who regularly come close to expressing an opinion get trolled constantly. This is a men-on-women issue. Guys are pretty much doing it to the girls.
We gravitated to the idea of social entrepreneurs when it was a fairly nascent thing. We began to build the organization, focused on investing in and celebrating social entrepreneurs. Not long after that, we realized there was another opportunity to help bring them together and tell their stories.
When I was in the Army, the unit I served in, you could never stop. It was a volunteer unit, and there was a fairly high rate of attrition. The people who stayed through are the people who were either great at it or the people who just didn't know how to stop. And I fell into that second category.
In the South we experienced, you know, some black kids who gave us a hard time because - cause 'you talk white.' We didn't talk white. We talked fairly proper. Plus, we had a Midwestern accent, so we didn't have a Southern accent, either. So it wasn't really talking white; it was talking different.
A lot of golfers take the club back with almost no upper-body rotation - they're all arms. And even when they do rotate back, it's usually on a flat shoulder plane. If your shoulders turn back fairly level with the ground, it's hard to swing down from inside the target line and hit an accurate shot.
Hiring and retaining talent in the tech industry is expensive and vital. Those people have real power over their bosses, especially because it is often fairly easy for them to find work elsewhere, and employee walkouts are terrible PR for these leaders who are often obsessed with their public image.
Advertising seemed almost natural to me because it was a business where you had to inform, persuade and educate. And so from being a junior copywriter to being the creative director of one of the largest advertising agencies in the country took me 4.5 years, which is, well, a fairly spectacular rise.
Rest is key. I need to get the right rest time and family time to stay refreshed. My downtime is for family activity. That's all about there is. I never switch off. Running my day-to-day golf business is a fairly busy one. There's a lot of moving parts and I'm trying to simplify it and make it easier.
I think I'm fairly good with money, but I've developed some strange tics - in shops I don't like to go to the counter unless I've got at least two things to buy. If I'm walking around with just one thing in my hand I'll put it back and wait a few weeks because that doesn't seem like a proper purchase.
If people are worried, if they're fearful, if they feel a sense of grievance or that they're not being treated properly or that they're not being paid fairly, what you're going to have is you're going to have people doing the minimum amount of work necessary to not get fired, and not a peppercorn more.
I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are.
We are patriotic enough to believe there is no good reason why foreign investors from Europe cannot be expected to resolve any disputes fairly through British justice, operating through British courts. And we are European enough to think that our companies can do the same by relying on European courts.
'Somebody That I Used to Know,' like a lot of the record, was a bit of a struggle to finish. It was written fairly quickly - I wrote it in November 2010 - but it took six months to find Kimbra and really realize she was the right vocalist to make the female part come to life. There were constant hurdles.
I knew that I was a gay boy fairly early; what was interesting to me was that my mother didn't know. She made me play baseball - I had no desire to do that. I said, 'Mom, I don't like direct sunlight, I don't like bugs, I don't like grass, and I'd rather be in the house playing with your fabric samples.'
Not having finished high school and having been fairly utilitarian in the way I went about college, I didn't have a deep liberal arts background. So we'd go to lunch and people would talk about their favorite seventeenth-century poets, and I'd be thinking, 'Could I even name five poets? From any century?'
I realized doing this work, identifying either issues or challenges or thinking about opportunities to actually impact people's lives, I could actually make things better, and bringing people around the table for solutions was something I liked doing and was actually something I was able to do fairly well.
You sit men and women down and give them a maths test, and they will do fairly equally. Then you set up the same test, but with different people, and make them tick a box to say whether they are a man or a woman, and the women do significantly worse in the maths test than they did previously in a group set.
I'm a fairly ordinary person - a lifelong reader, a former software engineer, and former math teacher. I come from a wonderful family of teachers, musicians, librarians, and engineers. I think I surprised them as well as my friends and coworkers when I took up writing as a hobby and let it take over my life!
The problem started before World War I. The gold standard was working fairly well. But it broke down because of the war and what happened in the 1920s. And then the U.S. started to become so dominant in the world, with the dollar becoming the central currency after the 1930s, the whole world economy shifted.
Even though it's a shortened format of the game, Twenty20 allows people with different skills to play in a team and play their specific roles. Obviously there's not too much time to waste balls, but if you look at guys who play well in the top six, they have a fairly decent amount of good cricketing ability.
If we're talking about someone creating something new, those rights are fairly well defined (in the United States, at least) under existing copyright law. But then there's often discussion about the rights of people who produce works under work-for-hire arrangements, which can be far more subtle and nuanced.
I think higher ed in the U.S. is fairly healthy, and by global standards it dominates, and it makes people more productive. But a lot of our K-12 is a disaster. And the single most important reform would just be to fire the worst ten or 15 percent of teachers in the lot, and we would have massive improvements.
When I write about Mickey Haller as the Lincoln lawyer, I totally see Matthew McConaughey because he took that character when that character was still fairly new to me - only two or three years old - when I knew McConaughey was going to play him. He's also the same age, the right age, in comparison to the book.
There are two chief responsibilities of the Secretary's office. One is to run the elections in the State of Connecticut to make sure they run fairly and efficiently because the Secretary is the chief election official. The Secretary of the State is also the chief business registrar for the State of Connecticut.
I love being on stage. I'm completely, totally relaxed. It's the only time in my life when I know where I am and what's coming next. The other Robert Powell is probably fairly melancholic. Let's just say happiness isn't my default position. There are dark parts. I'm very good at it. I frighten people sometimes.
Nature is not evil. The world occasionally shrugs its shoulders, and people get knocked off. The earth, for geological reasons that are well known, is a fairly risky place to live. To be evil, you have to have intent. Any remarkable natural happening in which no human will is employed cannot be regarded as evil.
In the 2012 election, the polls that had made Mitt Romney so confident that he was going to win were his own internal polls, based on models that failed to accurately estimate voter turnout. But the public polls, especially statewide polls, painted a fairly accurate picture of how the electoral college might go.
I suppose for me, with 'Djesse,' I realized fairly early in the process that I also needed a character to walk this path, which in some ways is me, and in some ways is not me. I think of Djesse a bit like the infinite child who can see everything and walk into everything as light as a feather and just alchemize.
Writers divide fairly cleanly into those who only work through what they hear and those who are more visual. I am the latter, where I lie down on my office floor and play scenes through my head to - cinematically, several times with different elements - to see what works. I can't write a scene until I can see it.
After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at 'Dracula.' Halfway through it, I understood I'd never be going back, never 'leaving' the genre again. Since then, I've been on a fairly strict horror diet.
I had been very impressed with the voiceover of 'Apocalypse Now,' with Martin Sheen's voice. That was a great voiceover; it really internalized the Martin Sheen character, who was essentially fairly low key and didn't say a lot during the whole movie. But he thought a lot, so I always thought that was really great.
I'm so much more gratified by my life now that I have an expertise. I wake up every day thinking about a fairly small set of scientific questions all related to the psychology of achievement, and I'll never get bored of those questions. That's something I couldn't say to you when I was 22 or 25 or probably even 31.
When I was younger, humans went to the moon when I was about 4 years old, and I imagined that as I got older and became an adult that traveling in space was going to be fairly common and something that we all did. So I grew up believing that I'll be an astronaut just like these guys were that were going to the moon.
In medicine, there's a fairly large but still finite body of knowledge that you need at hand for most of your daily work. It takes a few years to learn it, but once it's there, it's there. With writing, on the other hand, every new book - indeed, every new story - is a fresh and terrifying reinvention of everything.
I believe that the environment at home has been fairly secular and liberal. And most times, it comes from my mother. Our culture is very strong, but at the same time, she's a very free-spirited person. She's an artiste, and that's the environment I grew up in, where films and music were respected and meditated upon.
I wake up fairly early every day, by 8, for sure. Sunday is a lighter writing day than the weekdays, but I still wake up and write for about an hour, beginning right around 8. I definitely have coffee first, and then I start writing. I do think it's kind of hard to get the right level of concentration without coffee.
One of my earliest recollections is being woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning by my parents and sat in front of the fairly new black and white television, watching a grainy image of a man in a white suit climbing down a ladder. It was the first moon landing, and I became a sort of spaceman, as many kids were.
Lamentably, alien audiences may be frustrated by the switch to digital television. That's because the transmitter power for DTV is fairly evenly spread across the spectrum. The spikiness is gone, and from afar, the attention-grabbing squeals of analog television's carriers have been replaced by DTV's smooth, low hiss.
I understood Stephen's point of view because if you had been given a death sentence at the age of 21, would you find it easy to believe in a loving God? Also, Stephen's work was taking him into the depths of the universe, and it was, I thought, fairly understandable that there wasn't much room for God in his equations.
In theory, cars are fairly simple. If they don't start, it's either the fuel system or the electrical system. Teach yourself about the path of each in your engine and tracing it is fairly straightforward. But at the beginning, mastering each new system seems like an unreachable shore. The car is effectively a black box.
It is very nice Kasper has now also won the Premier League, too. I am very proud; I think he has done a fantastic job. It has been amazing to bring this lad into the world and bring him up and hear his wishes and hopes for the future, his ambitions; he made it fairly clear early on that he wanted to become a footballer.
I think that a lot of things are hard to read if you're not in the vocabulary flow of that particular discourse. I sometimes forget that even though the words I'm using are fairly ordinary words, the concepts around which they cluster, which are the long concepts of literary tradition, may not be familiar to an audience.
On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it extends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future he cannot measure. In other words, this business deals with the future which we all prefer to regard as unending.
As for my writing process, there is one truth I have discovered after writing some twenty-plus books: Not every book is the same, but the middle of every book is where I really begin to question my choice of vocations. The beginning and end is usually fairly clear to me, but that middle just sucks the life right out of me.
I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee.
I had a fairly enlightened dad, though if you looked at his resume, it might not seem that way. He was a chartered accountant for Price Waterhouse. He was strict, and we had a very ordered life. To this day, I am the least materialistic person I know, because my father didn't raise me to just go out and buy this or that car.
Secured cards can be helpful credit rebuilding tools for two reasons. First, because of the collateral, you can get them at a time when you're not likely to be approved for nonsecured cards. And as long as you maintain an on-time payment history, they can help you start to build a recent credit history that's fairly pristine.