When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn't know it had a name.
You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!
Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.
Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.
What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism.
Quentin Tarantino is a hip-hop artist. I told him, "You're hip-hop!" You keep seeing surprises, and a clip here and there, because Quentin is hip-hop. A hip-hop artist will drop a single, leak something over here, and drop something over there 'cause he knows it's hot. He's on the spot with the way he does things.
There's this whole sexy thing that happens to women when we walk the red carpet, and it's all okay! At home, I am so many other things! I am just a girl dreaming. I am emotional and goofy.
I see my purpose in life as making the world a happier place to be in.
Contraction of theological influence has at once been the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual advance.