My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.
I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don't think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.
I've always loved video games. I played 'Ms. Pac-man' with my dad, and I Ioved 'Galaga' and 'Tempest' and grew up on the standing arcade games. Even to this day, my dad will call me if he's playing 'Ms. Pac-man' and hold the phone up to the game.
I thought I would be in a band like Arcade Fire or be like Fiona Apple - but pop just made sense to me.
Arcade Fire always churns out music that makes me want to move.
The gaming world is a complete mystery to me! Well, I did play Pac Man and Frogger using big machines at an arcade back in the '80s.
The only kind of notebook I actively dislike is the steno pad, entirely because of that vertical line down the middle of the page. I presume it has some arcane secretarial use, but to me, it's both ugly and confusing.
The McDonald's icon of the colours and the golden arch, for me, resonates as one of the most iconic images ever.
The camera lens or the television camera is still just a proscenium arch. And as a great old character actor once said to me, wherever you're acting, you reach up and take hold of the proscenium arch, and you pull it down around your shoulders.
Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.
The majority of the research I do is archaeological research, but to me, as a professor, the most important thing is to encourage and mentor students.
So much of the physical world has been explored. But the deluge of data I get to investigate really lets me chart new territory. Genetic data from people living today forms an archaeological record of what happened to their ancestors 10,000 years ago.
Most people in archeology find their specialties in strange and unique ways. I always wanted to do archaeology, and then the time came for me to actually be in the field, and it was excruciatingly boring. Excavation is really, really boring.
I don't think marriage is in the cards for me. I think it's an archaic institution.
I had a full exorcism performed on me from an archbishop.
My mother wanted me to be a reader. She was a reader. Even though she had an 11th-grade education, she was curious about all kinds of things - archeology, anthropology.
I have been practicing archery for a long time; a bow and arrow helps me to unwind.
My dad keeps referring to me playing the piano when he's trying to teach me something in archery.
And for me anyway, consciousness is three components: a personal component which for lack of a better word we can call the soul. A collective component which is more archetypal and a deeper level, and then a universal domain of consciousness.
Witches were part of my imaginary childhood playground, so I wanted to make an archetypal fairytale about the mythic idea of what New England was to me as a kid.
