After three months of singing, Hef heard me practicing once. He tried to convince me to quit singing lessons because there was no chance of being good at it. Of course, I cried a lot when he said that, but it was my money that I was investing in lessons so I continued partly out of spite and partly because I really wanted to do it.

Barbi Benton

It is undeniable that the looming environmental crisis is partly the consequence of population growth.

Abhijit Banerjee

Partly, identity politics is a result of economic failure.

Abhijit Banerjee

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.

Abraham Verghese

I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.

Ad Reinhardt

My grandmother, whom I adored, and who partly raised me, loved Liberace, and she watched Liberace every afternoon, and when she watched Liberace, she'd get dressed up and put on makeup because I think she thought if she could see Liberace, Liberace could see her.

Alan Furst

To me, marriage is partly a religious thing and I'm not religious.

Alastair Campbell

My public caricature - that of a self-confident alpha male - is only partly accurate.

Alastair Campbell

I'm definitely not above wanting to be liked. Because, I mean, that feels less... lonely? But to be honest, because it was never my dream, I live quite a pressure-less existence, y'know. And of course, that's not true, but it's partly true.

Aldous Harding

I always did music privately as a hobby, I think partly because I was nervous to do it in front of other people.

Alessia Cara

I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.

Alex Garland

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

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn't breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children's mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

Alice Munro

And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.

Alison Bechdel

Partly I resented being perceived as weak because I was a girl.

Alison Bechdel

I battled with my weight as a teenager, partly because there wasn't the information or conversation about how to live a healthy lifestyle.

Alison Sweeney

I never get obsessed with ratings, partly because the Channel series 'Utopia,' which I did, had small ratings but a passionate following, which allowed a second series.

Alistair Petrie

Policy people suffer their own kind of agony, and no wonder. After all, what is the average life of the policy person? You go into government if you are lucky, do your best, aren't appreciated, take all the blame for policies for which you are only partly responsible, leave, realize your reputation has been damaged, maybe permanently.

Amity Shlaes

To believe that your husband, wife, parents, kids, boss, job, bank account, or body is even partly responsible for your emotions, to think that there are bullets 'out there' that you have to contend with, that there are stressful life events to overcome, is to miss something vital.

Andrew J. Bernstein

I'm an early bird, partly because I like to have some quiet time and partly because by 9am emails begin arriving, the phone starts ringing and I have dragons to kill of one sort or another.

Andrew Motion

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.

Andrew Motion