The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality.
Adam Johnson
Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.
Adam Mansbach
My daughter is a very adventurous eater. I'm not the guy who sits around lamenting that all my kid will eat it is Tater Tots and chicken nuggets. With my kid, it's more a capricious and whimsical decision-making.
Domestic employees are at the whim of their employers.
Ai-jen Poo
Snow is like a manic pixie dream girl: fun and whimsical when you encounter it only through the barrier of a movie screen - but absolute misery to have to put up with in real life.
Alexandra Petri
I've spent half my life on planes. I have a lot of love for New Zealand, though. That is where the really arty, whimsical side of the family resided - in Hobbitland.
Alice Englert
Success is an absurd, erratic thing. She arrives when one least expects her and after she has come may depart again almost because of a whim.
Alice Foote MacDougall
Sunken gardens should be laid out under the supervision of an intelligent landscape architect; and even then should have a reason for being sunken other than a whim or increase in costliness.
Alice Morse Earle
People who gentrify are usually new transplants to a city, changing it to suit their particular cultural needs and whims.
Annalee Newitz
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
Annie Dillard
Marriage is not all rainbows and butterflies; you have to give in to your partner's whims every now and then, and that's a two-way street.
Asha Parekh
As a child, I was spoilt by my parents as an only son. They indulged my every whim, and I grew up in luxury.
Asif Ali Zardari
Independence is not a whim or an ambition. It is the necessary condition of our survival as an ethnic group.
Aslan Maskhadov
Our constitution should be inspired by the philosophy of the Koran with principles that are set in stone and not open to the whims of individual judges, as is the case now. In particular, the constitution should protect every citizen's basic human rights regardless of their sex, status or sect. Everyone should be equal before the law.
Basmah bint Saud
I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.
bell hooks
During the couple of years it took to write 'At The Bottom of Everything', I decided, on the sort of hopeful whim that occasionally overtakes me, to sign up for piano lessons.
Ben Dolnick
Where once Lego offered a whimsical form of escapism into the world of the subconscious, encouraging creativity and imagination, it's transformed into a rigid 'box ticking' discipline where children are encouraged to build by conformity.
Ben Fogle
English history turned on Henry VIII and his desires, his whims almost. And it was down to Cromwell to make those desires happen. He was the guy that fixed it. He was also the guy that eased Henry's conscience. Because Henry VIII had an enormous, tender conscience and great theological knowledge.
Ben Miles
Even talking, I'm super-loud. I could never have that kind of meek, little wispy whimsical lavender and lace voice. It comes from my body. There's no way I can fight it.
Beth Ditto
I always like hair being a little messy because I think there's something appealing about the whimsy of putting on a gown with any hair or make-up - just stepping into it, and you're ready.
Blake Lively
Everything Republicans once claimed to advocate - entitlement reform, free trade, standing up to dictators, encouraging the march of freedom around the world - turns out to be negotiable and reversible, depending on Donald Trump's whims and the furies of his base.
When the Obama administration passed the net neutrality rules in 2015, even when we were winning, I favored trying to get these rules in a statute, because I feel that the best way to establish predictability for the marketplace is to make sure they're not subject to the whims of a partisan vote at the FCC.
It's see no evil, hear no evil with toxic male gamers - whose every whim and adolescent fantasy has been catered to for decades.
Be fun! I don't like homes or rooms that don't have a sense of humor or have some sense of whimsy or a personality. Your home should reflect who you are, and what you love. I would never have something in my home because it's the thing to have. I have to love it and it needs some connection to me.
The rugs that I picked out and the pillows with the little owls, sort of like whimsical throw pillows - I feel like you can never enough whimsical throw pillows in your house, in your life. My husband probably disagrees.
A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.
This is where I would lodge my deepest criticisms. We have very whimsically been threatening and then backing off of tariffs. The people who are paying the price for the lack of strategy are North Carolina consumers who are paying more for durable goods and North Carolina farmers who don't have markets today.
Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.
The kinds of roles dogs fill can be hard to come by in human relationships. We touch the dog or the pet at whim. There is a lack of self-consciousness and a fluidity to it that is absent from most human relationships. If someone acted that way to you, you'd feel claustrophobic pretty quickly. It's a boundary violation.
By Congress delegating its authority to the executive and judicial branches, we've removed the American people from the process. They're left as bystanders to the whims of executive overreach, and they're watching the country they know and love slip away. Worse, they think their representatives are powerless to stop it.
Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.
Analysts say that one reason Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were privatized in the first place was to prevent political whims from dominating the mortgage marketplace.
On my first album, I felt like, if it was going to be turned into a movie, it would have been directed by Sofia Coppola. She creates this kind of pastel-colored palette that's very whimsical but also very stagnant. And that's really how I heard the record.
Amplifying body-image issues, profiting from anxiety, and employing virtual slaves in sweatshops are bad enough, but the fashion industry is also actively hastening the destruction of the very Earth we walk on. It insists on launching fresh collections each season, declaring yesterday's range obsolete on a whim.
Being solo really lends itself to different interpretations - and everything is in the moment and on a whim. I never realised how far out you can go when you are by yourself.
With Citizens United, the Supreme Court's declaration that corporations are people, the whims of one can silence the voices of millions.
The fact that 'A Dirty Job' has comedy and supernatural horror in it, that both are woven in and out of it with a whimsical tone, despite the fact that it's about death, makes it hard to characterize with standard genre labels - but I have no problem with that. I'd call it a funny story about death, and leave it at that.
In a movie, you have to be mindful that no budget is going to be able to deal with running around the globe at every whim of the writer.
Can anyone create an enduring business on the Web, where it's easy to build new companies, and when survival depends on the whims of fickle users? The big lesson of 'Digg' may be simply this: if someone offers you a ridiculous amount of money for a company that wasn't that hard to build, don't think twice. Take the money and run.
In this movie, you have all the things you love from Tim. All the magic and the whimsy and the surreal, but he also has a fantastic story of a father and son that really gets under your skin.
The framers hated the tyranny of King George, but they were also afraid of the mob. That's why they put so many checks and balances into our system, to guard against the excesses of a government that might be inflamed by public passion or perverted by a dictator's whim.
Kids love the 'Mario Brothers' games, which are whimsical, inventive and lots of fun.
I'm interested in non-fiction, but a form of it which is very badly behaved, which doesn't define itself as straight-ahead journalism or memoir. It blurs boundaries, plays fast and loose with the truth - not to be silly, whimsical or lazy, but to get greater purchase on what it feels like to be alive.
I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.
All of the best songs happen on a whim.
We have seen too many arbitrary Strasbourg diktats based on the whims of European judges - from prisoner voting to blocking deportation of Abu Qatada - rather than a sober reading of the sensible list of core freedoms in the European Convention itself.
As an actor, you do feel very powerless... you are at the whim of the agent who submits you for a project, and then at the audition, you are at the whim of the casting director who will cast you or not.
We don't want Arizona to be dependent on the whims of Barack Obama and the federal government.
When you're young, you're always wondering when you're actually going to feel like a grownup. And I think you probably fear it, in a sense, too. There's a danger to feeling like an adult... like this whimsical kid in you is going to die or something. And then all of a sudden, one day you kind of feel like an adult and it's really nice.
At 35, I'm definitely starting to feel more like a grown-up than I ever have. There's nothing in my life that is childish or whimsical. Having fun is fantastic and I never want to lose a sense of that - and also, I think, you have to have that to put into your work or else it's going to feel stiff.
