. . . what's in a person's heart and soul will not likely be changed by the ability to command a helicopter to land on the South Lawn.
Comedy has traditionally been about fear of embarrassment.
My loneliness. . . still comes over me sometimes. . . It's a liminal, lost sensation of having wandered wide, endless boulevards, among rows of orange trees, winter butterflies, seasons reversed and out of order, dogs barking from behind fences meant to keep out intruders. It's not the place that impoverishes me but I who bring my own sense of poverty, of loss, to the place. It's a sense of near nothingness, as though I were not so much a blank slate as an erased chalkboard, still bearing illegible smudges of smoothed-over writing.
Writing books is one of the ways that human beings deal with loss, especially when you don't have religious consolation available.
There are people who are very good at disconnecting themselves and becoming other people, and separating from their family lives and going on. They change their names, they become someone else entirely, maybe out west.
I really wanted to get out of that cycle in our family where somebody's taking revenge on somebody for some slight that happened thirty years ago, and the only way to assert one's existence is by climbing over the body of an unfortunate sibling, or with a fellow family member, and you end up even unconsciously rejoicing in the other person's unhappiness and being like, I am happy because I can see how unhappy these other people are.
There is something to be said for the openness to form, and literary form because it forces you to actually think about the other person, and their motivations, and to try to see them from all sides and to really write about them not as caricature.
To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
My metaphor for acting in movies - not on stage because it's completely different on stage - is to put colors on an easel for the director to paint his own painting with in the editing room, long after I've left. You buy me for red and black, so I better give you really great red and black, but if I can give you purple, pink, green and brown too, I will.
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.