I can't even lie: Sometimes, I be antisocial.
A Boogie wit da Hoodien
Every time I step on stage an' see all of the lights or hear fans singing the words to my songs ,it's a surreal moment for me.
I overloaded myself with work. I give myself work to do so I don't give myself time to chill and have free time to chill with the family as much.
Most of the time, I'm making music. There'll be moments of my life where I feel like I gotta to take a break and come back to the music. It's hard to explain, but you need to get a break from it and then come back to it. It's like you gotta lose something to appreciate it.
'Remember the Time' and 'You Rock My World' from Michael Jackson were two of my favorite songs ever. My mom used to bump them all the time.
I had to realize that you can't try to get money, support yourself, and grind doing whatchu need to do at the same time. The music is the grind. You really gotta grind. You gotta find your way around. You can't be stuck tryna get there.
Have you noticed that almost all the change in the world goes to women? When was the last time you had a five pence piece? Exactly. In a Christmas pudding. All the rest of it is in women's handbags.
A. A. Gill
Everyone has to go to a funeral at some time and you need to be dark and sombre, and in a black tie.
I don't have prejudices against anybody. I have opinions, based on a lifetime's experience.
When I joined the Sunday Times the people I was competing with were all 10 or 15 years younger, they all had double firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, they were all bright as new pins.
My only piece of advice is that all of you consider every single text and Snapchat that you ever make as also being shared with your partner, because they all check your phones all the time - trust me on this one.
You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.
A. A. Milne
In a time of crisis, there is rational tendency to turn to the writer.
A. B. Yehoshua
Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive.
A. Bartlett Giamatti
This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you're going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.
All the best stories are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
A. C. Benson
Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.
A. E. Housman
A lot of times you have to dip into the independent world to find the really great projects and the really great scripts. They're out there - you just have to search hard.
A. J. Cook
I tried the paleo diet, which is the caveman diet - lots of meat. And I tried the calorie restriction diet: The idea is that if you eat very, very little - if you're on the verge of starvation, you will live a very long time, whether or not you want to, of course.
A. J. Jacobs
There's a very passionate pro-chewing movement on the Internet called Chewdiasm. They say that we should be chewing 50 to 100 times per mouthful, which is insane. I tried that. It takes like a day and a half to eat a sandwich. But their basic idea is right. If you chew, you'll eat slower and you will get more nutrients.
The pattern of a newspaperman's life is like the plot of 'Black Beauty.' Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.
Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.
It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue - but I would argue it nevertheless - that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music - both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing - is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.
If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.
On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes.
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.
The critical period of matrimony is breakfast-time.
Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.
English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.
It's when children are 15, 16 or 17 that they decide whether they want to be a doctor, an engineer, a politician or go to the Mars or moon. That is the time they start having a dream, and that's the time you can work on them. You can help them shape their dreams.
I have an inner satisfaction of having done what I thought was right at the time which I thought was propitious.
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.
Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.
I believe that whatever comes at a particular time is a blessing from God.
Wisdom comes from within. Knowledge is acquired and can sometimes put a screen on your wisdom.
Sometimes, a remix is good because it reaches a whole new generation. But when it gets too much, it's irritating. Also, the original composer needs to be credited properly.
I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.
Some things are very low profile, but if they excite me creatively, I accept them. Sometimes there are high-profile projects, and you have to do it. We all have human limitations. It is a painful decision to turn things down. Even accepting 'Slumdog Millionaire' was a decision that I had to sacrifice another project.
I have too many responsibilities and principles. There's no time for 'guilty' pleasures.
I think I can get away, sometimes, with walking in the streets and not getting noticed. I like that. I want my work to get noticed, not me. And it's slowly getting there, which is good.
Every time I sit for a song, I feel I am finished. It's like a beggar sitting waiting for God to fill your bowl with the right thought. In every song, I ask help from Him. Everybody around is so good, so to create music that will connect with so many people is not humanly possible without inspiration.
I follow a simple formula when I compose. I ask myself, 'What would the audience want to hear?' and 'Why would they buy my CDs?' And the process of answering these questions through music follows. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it backfires.
After a point of time, when you get success and fame, money and everything, the purpose of life has to be redefined. For me, I think that purpose is to build bridges. Artists can do that very easily, more than politicians.
When I travel with my kids abroad, I am not myself, but I'm more a father who wants to protect them. Sometimes, I am even aggressive about certain things and get surprised seeing myself like that: for instance, when people want to take pictures of them. I am fine if they want to take my pictures, but they are not public property.
When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.
I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.
For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine.
I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.
Clark Gable seemed fascinating all his life because there wasn't so much information about him. Today, you're on television all the time.
I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.
