In 1967, London Weekend Television asked me to head up their sports coverage. I got to work with guys like Brian Moore and Dickie Davies. We were the first ones to come up with the idea of the pundits' panel. Although, since I was one of the pundits, it's debatable how good an idea that was.
Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.
You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.
I am sure it will be mentioned and debated but from my standpoint I know who is in the Hall of Fame. A lot of them don't belong in the Hall of Fame. If someone wants to debate me, check the stats.
I can't ever remember sitting around and saying, 'gosh let's hurry up and get these debates going, that'll win it for me.' Nope.
I'm pretty good at sticking to what I know. You don't see me social commentating on health-care or presidential debates. I talk about what I know because I'm petrified of being wrong.
I think it's one of the challenges of modern politics, which is, how do you communicate who the candidate is, and what they really believe, in the short time period you have? And for me, the best opportunity was the debates, and I think I was in real trouble before the debates, and I think the debates helped me a lot.
One thing debating did was bring me in contact with a whole social world that I had never experienced before. It's sort of a very international, very niche hobby.
Part of what was in the ether all around me growing up, until I was between 19 and 20, was a terrible, debilitating stutter. It was part of what made me very reclusive as a kid.
Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.
'Zabriskie Point' was a time when I was in a lot of change and flux, and these incredible visuals hit me like they had rearranged the organs in my body. The ending and the free-floating debris and everything is an image that burned itself in my consciousness.
For me, people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes.
It is very iniquitous to make me pay my debts, you have no idea of the pain it gives one.
Asian music influenced Debussy, who influenced me - it's all a huge circle.
For me, Debussy is the door to all 20th-century music.
When I was younger, I used to do that a lot: I would hear a part of a song that would really relax me and then put it on repeat. That would send me to sleep. It was quite obvious classical music, people like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel.
For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel.
For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in 'Paris' were written with Debussy's 'String Quartet,' his 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune,' or Canteloube's 'Songs of the Auvergne' playing in the background.
I have no doubt that there are great people about though... the thing of it is, nothing to this day moves me like classical music (Debussy, Vaughn Williams).
What I've learned is that it's okay to take from heroes, such as Debussy, but it has to be filtered through my own personality so that ultimately it's me.
