Thanks to postmodernism, we tend to see all facts as meaningless trivia, no one more vital than any other. Yet this disregard for facts qua facts is intellectually crippling. Facts are the raw material of thought, and the knowledge of significant facts makes sophisticated thought possible.

Alexandra Petri

The way actors interact with their audience via Twitter is a part of their personality. So if I interact less, that is a part of my personality. I am mostly lost in my own world.

Aamir Khan

Art World Wit

On the PBS recording of 'The Light in the Piazza' backstage, you get to see me doing some sweet lunges down the hallway of the Vivian Beaumont.

Aaron Lazar

Age You Way

If it weren't for the fellow union members and leaders who have my back, the barons of the TV industry would happily pay me a nickel a page and spend what would have been my residuals on more caviar to put in their infinity pools.

Adam Conover

Age Would Who

If someone comes to me, any community in the Northern Territory, with a viable economic future, and says, 'We want to be part of a bold new approach,' I'll put them down as a major project, and I'll do everything I can to help them out.

Adam Giles

Future Art Wit

Blip.tv is growing its audience by forming partnerships with traditional TV manufacturers and a new breed of company in the set-top box market that lets consumers connect to the Internet via their televisions.

Adam Ostrow

Art Wit Wing

I think I'm a trivia nerd. I love to learn about everything. I'm curious.

Adam Rodriguez

Love Via Very

I got really into Martin Scorsese as a teenager, so then it was kind of the whole reason I wanted to be an actor. Just like tons of young actors, I think, get freaked out by the Scorsese/DeNiro movies. I loved all his movies in the '90s, too. Then I got a part in 'The Aviator' and couldn't believe it.

Adam Scott

Teen Movies Love

I've been almost everywhere. But I've never been to the steppes of Latvia. It's something I've always wanted to do.

Adam West

Where Ways Way

A lot of people ask me, 'Are you going to do a sequel to 'The Guest' or 'You're Next?' - those movies weren't financially viable, so even though there are a lot of fans of it, it'd be a pretty small market we'd be appealing to. It's got to be a big hit for you to really justify that.

Adam Wingard

Movies You Were

I love all Helmut Lang. I love Alexander Wang and Alice+Olivia.

Addison Timlin

Love Via T

I love all Helmut Lang. I love Alexander Wang and Alice+Olivia. And there's this brand called Hengst that makes a killer jumpsuit. I'm a sucker for those.

Addison Timlin

Love Via Those

I like that Pilates compromises the mind and body. It's not just about being able to run around the block a few times. It's about alleviating stress and controlling breathing. It's about being balanced.

Aimee Mullins

Time Via Us

I have a girl crush on Olivia Munn so much, especially on 'Newsroom.' And Cara Delevingne, but who doesn't love her face? Viola Davis is my acting crush.

Aja Naomi King

Love Car Who

I think comics are faster to draw with a pen and then fill and tone by computer. But my illustrations are all done via computer. I even draw the lines on a tablet.

Akira Toriyama

Wit Via Us

I tell my students, if you ever become comfortable with your role as criminal defense lawyer, it's time to quit. It should be a constant source of discomfort, because you're dealing with incredible moral ambiguity, and you've been cast into a role which is not enviable.

Alan Dershowitz

Time Your You

The word liberal distinguishes whatever nourishes the mind and spirit from the training which is merely practical or professional or from the trivialities which are no training at all.

Alan K. Simpson

Word Which Whatever

When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn't have to follow 'Watchmen' and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual.

Alan Moore

Work Men Art

I'm more convinced than when I accepted this job that we can create a viable Ford Motor Co. that makes cars and trucks that people really do prefer. And we can make them using minimum resources and minimum time and be competitive with our competition.

Alan Mulally

Time Pet Car

Obviously I was challenged by becoming a Naval aviator, by landing aboard aircraft carriers and so on.

Alan Shepard

Car Via Us

No one predicted Mercury would be a planetary core with the mantle stripped off. No one predicted volcanoes on the Jovian moons, or oceans on the inside of them. I can tell you, for every single planet, huge 'we never guessed that' things.

Alan Stern

You Would Wit

I still indulge in a glass of wine or chocolate - treats are mandatory. Without deviating from the day-to-day healthy diet once in a while, it wouldn't be sustainable for me, and that's what I wanted: an approach to eating to last my entire life.

Alanis Morissette

By asking the question 'Am I happy?,' and via the answer setting out what I mean by happiness, there is a political route that can be taken, by asking another question - 'Can politics deliver happiness, and should it try?'

Alastair Campbell

I'm just happy to have some American readers - enough that it's a viable proposition for my books to appear there.

Alastair Reynolds

Some of the most important determinants of life paths arise through the most trivial of circumstances.

Albert Bandura

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

Albert Camus

For me, reworking the past over and over again is a way not to trivialise the garments and not to obsess over hem lengths. What I am interested in, as a matter of fact, is telling a story and, if someone sees fragments of other stories in it, be my guest. I don't have to justify myself. What is urgent for me is what I want to say.

Alessandro Michele

There are all sorts of inventive ways to get your film out there: sometimes via the Internet, sometimes via viral screenings in people's living rooms across the country.

Alex Gibney

My most memorable meal was with my parents at Joel Robuchon's Restaurant Jamin in Paris. It was Christmas 1982, and the flavors - from cauliflower and caviar to crab and tomato - astounded me. It was the first time I remember thinking that I would like to really learn how to cook.

Alex Guarnaschelli

I think Matt Yglesias is wrong to declare that the world of 'This Town' is dying, unless he thinks publicly financed elections, strict lobbying bans and Scandinavian-style wealth distribution are imminent.

Alex Pareene

The plumbing and pluvial dynamics of the Amazon, the largest freshwater system on Earth, are still far from understood. This is partly because it is a semi-open system. Moisture flows in and out unpredictably. A lot of nonlinear feedback loops and 'remote influences' - continental, transcontinental, oceanic, meteorological - come into play.

Alex Shoumatoff

If you fail to pay your minimums for any debt on time, your credit score will take a major hit and you run the risk of seeing the interest rate on all of your cards go up. An easy way to remind yourself to pay, is to sign up to receive your statements via e-mail.

Alexa Von Tobel

I quickly learned that as a fiction writer, you need the sort of details a historian or a biographer would find extraneous or useful to provide context via a footnote.

Alexander Chee

We have to find places that we protect away from government so that we can all be the unique and interesting and, in my case, somewhat deviant people we'd like to be.

Alexander Karp

Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a fresh way of viewing the both literature and the world. From then on, I found I was impatient with books that were not honest or that were trivial and frivolous.

Alexandra Fuller

Thanks to postmodernism, we tend to see all facts as meaningless trivia, no one more vital than any other. Yet this disregard for facts qua facts is intellectually crippling. Facts are the raw material of thought, and the knowledge of significant facts makes sophisticated thought possible.

Alexandra Petri

YouTube is covered in comments that would be better expressed - and better spelled - via a simple thumbs-up or down.

Alexandra Petri

Sylvia Plath wasn't scared of exploring the darker side of her psyche.

Alexis Bledel

It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.

Alfred Nobel

I've decided with the full agreement of my wife Sylvia Bongo Ondimba and my children that my share of the inheritance will be shared with all Gabonese youth because in my eyes, we are all heirs of Omar Bongo Ondimba.

Ali Bongo Ondimba

'Mr. Robot,' in particular, signals the rise of a fresh post-Occupy portrayal of the wealth gap. No longer is the story of income inequity delivered via a well-meaning, crushingly earnest indie film by John Sayles or in a single laugh line on 'Roseanne.'

Alissa Quart

In 1939, Fitzroy Maclean, a gangly Highland aristocrat in his early 30s, was serving as a British diplomat in the U.S.S.R. Disgusted by the Soviet show trials, he quit the Foreign Service and would go on to serve with Tito's partisans fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia.

Alistair Horne

People are treating the Stewart case as seriously as Enron when it's really over trivia.

Allan Sloan

I loved Dad more for treating the biological reality as trivial, irrelevant. He loved me no less than his other three children.

Allegra Huston

Vivian Abenshushan and Veronica Gerber write brilliant books that defy generic conventions.

Alvaro Enrigue

One good thing about being brought up with Chinese food from another country means that you're not a purist and you will accept deviation.

Alvin Leung

With caviar, you place a blob of it on sour cream or on a lettuce leaf and everyone is happy. I'm trying to get away from that.

Alvin Leung

Neil Gaiman swooped into my life though another friend, Jason Webley, who knew we were fans of each other's work and introduced us via email. Neil and I, like me and Ben, just hit it off instantly.

Amanda Palmer

The most important in the history of nations and individuals was once the most trivial, and vice versa. The plebeian, who is called today the 'man in the street,' can never see and understand the significance of the hidden seed of things, which in time must develop or die.

Ameen Rihani

Aviation, this young modern giant, exemplifies the possible relationship of women and the creations of science. Although women have not taken full advantage of its use and benefits, air travel is as available to them as to men.

Amelia Earhart

Aviation offered such fun as crossing the continent in planes large and small, trying the whirling rotors of an autogiro, making record flights. With these activities came opportunity to know women everywhere who shared my conviction that there is so much women can do in the modern world and should be permitted to do irrespective of their sex.

Amelia Earhart