As a teenager, I read a lot of science-fiction, but then I read 'Catch-22' and 'The Catcher in the Rye' and started reading more literary fiction.
The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be.
Christianity asserts that God made himself human. Those are two different categories - two different levels of worthiness. God is one category, and human is another. That's a downgrade. After that jump, there are no more categories - no more downgrades. There are no human levels of worthiness. There is no hierarchy in God's eyes.
In America, music is more tightly categorized.
By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside.
Catfish is not playing guitar no more, he's doing like a home-front thing. He had been in the business around ten years before I got in it, so I guess he's had enough of it.
Happy music that is genuinely joyful is probably the hardest music to write. I think miserable stuff is more natural to the human condition and maybe more cathartic.
To record an album is cathartic, or at least it was with 'Belus,' but to make music is more fulfilling than anything else, I think.
Readings are more like weaving a tapestry. Possibly people are getting a cathartic release - but music is physical. Music pummels you. It's got a beat; it's loud. Whereas this is more cerebral.
Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around - decisively - the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than 50 countries.
In the Catholic schools, they spend much less money than the public schools, and they get amazing results. Private schools spend much more money than the public schools, and they get remarkable results.
I would say that, intellectually, Catholicism had no more impact on me than did social theory.
Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism.
They say cats have nine lives. I've had 12 already and I don't know how many more I'll have.
Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance... the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human reason.
Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.
We need to wake up to the fact that it is not immigrants who are causing economic dislocations. It is technology and an evolving economy that is pushing more and more Americans to the sidelines.
If the works of Jesus were so much more wonderful than man could perform as to deserve to be called miracles, was it not nonsense to caution his disciples so strongly against being deluded by the works of others?
I thought, I need to be more cautious about my choices - it reflects on who I am.
The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.
