Socially I never was an outsider. I have never thought of the conflict element before frankly, but perhaps it was wanting to belong, and at the same time wanting to retain one's own personality.
What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
None of the more apparently expressive elements involved in my work - color, form, application, and so on - are important or instructive in themselves. They're all just a means of entry, markers pointing beyond themselves towards something broader and less controlled.
I, for one, will not have [the Vietcong] insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge.
When two elements combine and form more than one compound, the masses of one element that react with a fixed mass of the other are in the ratio of small whole numbers.
David Bowie used to cover loads of people, and there was an element of "David Bowie did it, so we wanted to do it," because we're kind of obsessed [with him].
'Cause I do so much homework I'm good to go on the first take; I don't want to rehearse. I like the element of what's unpredictable of that first take and nobody knows what's going to happen, and I'm a big fan of that.
Many foreigners have asked me how we made the Danish style. And I've answered that it. . . was rather a continuous process of purification, and for me of simplification, to cut down to the simplest possible elements of four legs, a seat and combined top rail and arm rest.
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
I think it's keeping a surprise element, so that the audience never gets ahead of you. I like to pull the rug out from audiences, I don't like for them to think they know what's happening next.
Any horror element is as much psychological as special effects.
The one element that stands out most clearly among our peak performers is their virtually unassailable belief in the likelihood of their own success.
In all my novels, a sense of place - not just geographic but social - is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton's class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.
The good thing is that all the symbolic elements are gone, and that which really matters - the core - is left.
When conventional tactics are altered unexpectedly according to the situation, they take on the element of surprise and increase in strategic value.
Courage is the essential element in any great public man or woman.
The element of obsession is terribly important for an artist.
Where there is a wine-shop, there are the elements of disease and the frightful source of all that is at enmity with the interests of the workmen.
The elements of life are dynamic patterns of mass and energy, events rather than objects.
Whenever the government is involved, there is an element of coercion.