For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.
This led me to understand that trade unionism, the instrument of working-class liberation and of social change could, and indeed should, be also an instrument of industrial progress.
If I felt we had alienated the Unionists, it would worry me because we've spent a great deal of time trying to open up discussion and dialogue with the Unionist Parties.
To me, there is nothing like the excitement and unique experience of a live orchestra playing.
Being speaker has afforded me a unique opportunity to serve parliament, for which I am immensely grateful.
Now I get exposure first with people directly in the clubs. This is a unique situation for me.
For me it's all about personal vision; is there something about a subject that uniquely speaks to me.
Uniqueness was something my mother pounded into me.
When I saw 'Fleabag,' and when this script came to me, there is a uniqueness and a dark naughtiness to Phoebe Waller-Bridge's sensibility that I did gravitate towards, very much.
While we have the gift of life, it seems to me the only tragedy is to allow part of us to die - whether it is our spirit, our creativity or our glorious uniqueness.
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
People bursting into song in unison and then pointing it at me is maybe the worst thing I can think of, never mind that you have to pay good money to go be yelled/danced at.
The Connection Machines owned by the United States government laboratories were made available to me because they were considered impossible to program and there was no great demand for them at that time.
I just can't imagine anyone in the United States military who would not understand the distinction between a jihadist and a radical Islamist and Muslims. I think that is snobbery from elitists. It goes to the issue, it seems to me, of an orthodoxy, a political correctness that has infiltrated the U.S. Army.
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.
There was one thing my daddy wouldn't tolerate in any shape, form or fashion, and that was being unkind or rude to somebody. That was just very important to my folks. And as it turns out, that was a legacy that he left me that money can't buy, is how to be able to treat people.
I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
But, sir, they have written me down upon the history of the country as worthy of expulsion, and in no unkindness I must tell them that for all future time my self-respect requires that I shall pass them as strangers.
I am a pretty emotional person. Any act of kindness or unkindness moves me. When I see a romantic couple sitting by the beach, it moves me. I don't break down or crack under pressure, but I am just sensitive.
I had spent so much time studying literature at Stanford and the history of medicine at Cambridge in an attempt to better understand the particularities of death, only to come away feeling like they were still unknowable to me.
