I'm a decent cook; I'm a decent chef. None of my friends would ever have hired me at any point in my career. Period.
During this period at the Department of Education, my working relationship with Judge Thomas was positive.
All success is, really, is having a predetermined plan and carrying it out successfully over a long period of time.
Every decent man had to be against fascism, period.
I can look back at my darkest periods and realize that these were the times when the Lord was holding me closest. But I couldn't see His face becasue my face was in His breast. . . crying.
Aubrey, crouching on a nearby counter, watched me with squinty eyes, apparently pondering why anyone would willingly immerse themselves in water ever, let alone for extended periods of time.
History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.
The best decision I ever made, period, was to get into the music business.
Naturally, in this period, there are also some ups and downs, and this is nothing strange.
In actor's career, I had a fair amount of denial, which I think is possibly in the genes, where I just couldn't go to, "Maybe this won't work out. " I just couldn't do it. My mind just refused to go there. I don't mean there weren't low periods. There were plenty. But I remember arriving in New York and I was maybe 32, and I didn't have an agent. I came from Chicago, where I had gone to school and worked and got my sea legs, so to speak, and I remember walking out of the subway, walking the streets, standing in front of the theater and saying, "I will work in this theater. "
I have great respect for Sean Penn. It's like most relationships that fail. It's not one thing, it's many thing that go on over a period of time.
One of the things the BBC does better than anyone is period drama.
Women had no clerical role anywhere in the Western world, period.
Life is a series of commas, not periods.
All actors who have been around for a long time, which I have, and have been skint for long periods, which I have, find it difficult to turn down jobs. If I turn anything down my stomach turns over. I feel sick. It feels like gambling.
The Bible is clear that God considers 40 days a spiritually significant time period. Whenever God wanted to prepare someone for his purposes, he took 40 days.
Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.
Music, as many people have said, is the universal language. Of course points are made which make you think about things, but ultimately it makes you feel. And that's why people remember more songs that have meant something during their life than films. They start to define periods in your life, and that's kind of the beauty of it.
The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.
I think that if I have a chance to go back, why not just go back all the way in history to the times of the pyramids or the Roman days? I think there are so many great historic times until now that I would like to get a little peek of those periods, rather than just 1984. Why limit yourself?