Lyrics became important for a while in the late Seventies. Patti Smith was a poet and a rock star, as much one as the other, the distinctions were a bit blurred and then you get swept up in it. Punk poet, it's a good enough term.
I love a lot of the New York bands, but Patti Smith stands out. I just read 'Just Kids' and it's an inspirational, well-written account of an emerging New York artist in the late seventies.
I don't want to peak too early. The worry is that you never know until it's all over whether you peaked at all - and then you're finished and it's too late.
I always felt like the Academy was very late in acknowledging things. I've seen them do it with hip hop when it should have been acknowledged. It was already penetrating mass levels of culture and radio, and yet they wouldn't give it a proper category.
A fool too late bewares when all the peril is past.
Anyway, in the mid 80's I was spending a fortune buying old Golden Age books from the late 30's and 40's and I was making personal appearances at a lot of sci fi and comic book conventions all around the country here so that I could find books for my collection.
The honorable William Penn, late governor of Pennsylvania, was chosen agent to the Court of Britain, and directed to deliver the petition to the King himself and to endeavor by his personal influence to procure a favorable reception to this last address.
Books are so cheap and easy to get that people don't bother stealing them, which is the essential rule of piracy that the music business learned much too late.
When I was doing 'A Disappearing Number' in Plymouth, we had to go on an hour and a half late, and I still hadn't written an end, so we had to make one up, and then we had to go out literally with our pants round our ankles.
At this late hour a wagon has been procured, and I have had it filled with plate and the most valuable portable articles, belonging to the house.
When I was 8 or 9, I started using bulletin board systems, which was the precursor to the Internet, where you'd dial into... a shared system and shared computers. I've had an email address since the late '80s, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then I got on the Internet in '93 when it was first starting out.
It is but too common, of late, to condemn the acts of our predecessors and to pronounce them unjust, unwise, or unpatriotic from not adverting to the circumstances under which they acted. Thus, to judge is to do great injustice to the wise and patriotic men who preceded us.
When I was in my late 30s, I lit a figure on fire on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It was me, a friend, and maybe eight people, tops. There wasn't any premeditation to it at all. It was really just a product of San Franciscan bohemian milieu.
If you're overbooked, you can't manage pressing problems or even recognize they're pressing until too late.
Our world needs to move from managing crises to preventing them in the first place. Too often, the world responds too late and too little.
In the late 1990s, I was a guest on a private plane. By the time my partners and I got off the flight, we knew we had to figure out how to fly privately more often.
During the late '50s, I had worked on the script of Ben-Hur in an office next to that of the producer Sam Zimbalist.
One-third of all professional baseball players come from Latin America, and Sosa is following role models such as the late Roberto Clemente, a Puerto Rican, from whom he adopted the No. 21. Now he is a model for others.
It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You'd get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed.
I'd never tried as hard with anything as I did with 'The Office,' and it was one of the things I'm proud of. I wasn't trying to be famous or a comedian, but this opportunity came along when I was 38 or 39. It came late, and I couldn't have been prouder of it.