When, in 2015, Greece decided by referendum to reject Brussels' austerity plans, the European Union's antidemocratic response took no one by surprise: To deny the people's will had become a habit.

So it took me five years because in the interim I have been doing a lot of personal appearances and movies and some television series that went into the plumbing and I stopped writing for a while.

I grew up in the GOP sandbox. My dad took me, age 7, to meet Herbert Hoover, in his apartment at the Waldorf Towers. He gave me a silver dollar. Being a young Republican, I spent it on comic books.

What you really remember at the beginning was that you have to throw a budget together. We made some terrible mistakes at the beginning in my own budget that took us at least a year to catch up on.

Getting a new passport took me a stupid amount of time. I had to go back five times with different photographs because they kept saying I was smiling, which is against the rules. I was not smiling.

To me, I was just doing my job when I took the field, but to understand how close I came to death, I now realize what God has given me when he brought me into this world; he knew what he was doing.

I bought one of those Learn How to Play Guitar Chords By Yourself and it shows you the diagram where to put your hands and I took that in my room, sat with my singles and learned how to play guitar.

Paul Lucas had a particularly amusing accent, so I chuckled. That was terrible; I shouldn't have done that, but he took it too big. He got up and said he couldn't work with people who laughed at him!

As a kid, I did some running but especially loved biking and swimming. I grew up on Long Island, and our mom took us all the time to the ocean, so I grew up doing open-water swimming in the Atlantic.

I've always been fascinated with sound, since I was a little kid when my mother Dorothy Dean took me to my first piano lesson. Later on, my guitar, bass guitar, and synthesizer were my secret weapons.

I began painting well before I started doing comedy. In fact, when I came out of the war in 1946, I enrolled in art school in Dayton, Ohio. I painted for three years, and then show business took hold.

It helps when 1 can send the children off to their fathers so I can support my new book with a national publicity tour. I started writing the book when my daughter was 5. It took me almost four years.

I didn't know of any rappers in Charlotte. Not to sound like I'm bragging, but I brought the music scene alive and shed the proper light on it. I took it to a whole other level when I started rapping.

Fahrenheit 9/11 took public domain information that should have been on the news every night and put it in a film that a lot of people went to see. But still Bush has never had to answer those charges.

I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

What's incredible with Trent Reznor is how he took all the alienation and the rejection of traditional rock and found a way to encapsulate it in a form that made the public finally get industrial music.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

I majored in sociology and never took a single music-related course, much less any kind of class in public speaking - no confidence for it, none - yet I still had a passion for it that burned inside me.

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

When I traveled as secretary of state, I was deluged with thick briefing books full of information about the politics, economy, and culture of each destination, so those took up most of my reading time.

It took 24 years for me to harness my autistic traits into something useful, and I have grown to regard them as a kind of superpower. Cooking, to me, is akin to algebra, and my mind a pocket calculator.

Charles Haley changed the way the Cowboys played football in the 90s. And the reason why I say that is because he was such a dominant force coming off the edge, where it took two and three to block him.

Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and woman how the human and the divine love could go hand in hand.

I'm such a pleaser - I want everyone around me to be happy - so it took a while for me to get to a point where I could say 'no, I need to be happy with everything that I put out.' I want it to be right.

I had no experience with broadcasting basketball games, so I took a tape recorder and went to a playground where there was a summer league, and I stood up in the top of the stands and I called the game.

Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.

It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

My dad was the one who took me to concerts and introduced me to new artists. One time, he drove me from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., on a school night to see 'U2' - he was a pretty dedicated Bono fan.

'Never Gonna Give You Up' in 1987 was a huge international hit followed by several more, and while I appreciated how lucky I was, it catapulted me into a completely new world and simply took over my life.

When I finished school, I took my entire life savings - $5,000 - and invested it in a business. I was young. I was inexperienced. But I was an entrepreneur, and I was proud. And in six weeks, I was broke.

We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.

My dad just left high school in '69, went to Woodstock, and after half a year of college for architecture, just took off for Alaska. He bought a van and went straight into the mountains and built a cabin.

I grew up in Iowa, and the improv comedy club Comedy-Sportz across the river in Illinois held auditions. They took me even though I was only 16 - you really had to be 18, but they never checked me for ID.

When I was young, my family didn't go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn't afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries.

I fell into acting because I was really shy, and so at night after work, I took public speaking and improv classes, and I started going to auditions sort of as a dare. That was my version of 'Fear Factor.'

The first generation of the young people of our revolution took up arms following Comrade Kim Il Sung and fought the bloody anti-Japanese struggle, thus achieving the historic cause of national liberation.

My Aunt Erna was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1939, alive, in a coffin with a spider plant at her feet. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1974 for 'Happy Days,' I took a cutting with me.

That was one of the great successes of removing Saddam Hussein, as we took Iraq out of the picture of having a sovereign nation from which the terrorists could operate. But this war has not gone perfectly.

Frank Sinatra took me to a whole new planet. I worked with him until he passed away in '98. He left me his ring. I never take it off. Now, when I go to Sicily, I don't need a passport. I just flash my ring.

It took me 14 years to write 'Crazy Brave' because I kept changing the form and I also kept running away from the story. I said I don't really want to write about myself. But it's about writing about memory.

The first punch I learned was the jab. Second, the cross punch; third, the hook - after that, all the combinations and how to move my head and feet. It took me just two months to be ready to get in the ring!

At the end of 'Afterlife' - hmm, how do I do this without spoilers - Skye took a very strange journey that crossed the boundary between life and death. And now, for her, that boundary is permanently blurred.

I grew up making music in my mum's basement, and I used to tell her I was going down there to work, and she'd say, 'That's not work. Go get a real job!' It took me signing a record deal to change her opinion!

I don't know what the big issue is about a kiss with Neve Campbell in Wild Things. It's a role, and I think a bigger issue is made out of it. It was a part I took and it's what the character did, so I did it.

I'm a New Yorker. I was there during 9/11 and I saw how, not only New York City stopped for a moment, we all took an inhale and exhale at the same time - the world united at that time, and it changed my life.

It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.

I can do more than anyone suspects. I pride myself on my versatility. It took 32 years of difficult parts, second leads, villains and juveniles. The Oscar changed the quality of the roles I was being offered.

One day, a chef moaned that he was too hot, so I took a carving knife in one hand, held his jacket with the other, and slashed it. Then I slashed his trousers. Both garments were still on his body at the time.

If you took away all pain, if everyone lived forever, everything would be bland, flat and boring; there would be no reason for art, music, newspapers, love because we would all be in a mono state of happiness.

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