There are machines that can get rid of your cellulite, so I want to do that. And my friend has just had a machine that has worked on her neck and tightened the elasticity of the skin. You just need a day off work afterwards, so I'm thinking, why not?
I kept thinking I would be spending my life up to my elbows in shampoo.
The only reason we don't notice how absolutely interwoven our thinking processes have become with older technologies - pencils, paper, electric light, penicillin, fire - is that they're old, so we've ceased to notice their effects.
Please don't make the mistake of thinking that 'Oryx and Crake' is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral.
I remember, as a kid, thinking more about, you know, watching the world go by and being amazed by how both complex but consistent and elegant it was. You know, why, you know, when you put that cold glass of water on the table, it kind of warms up at a very predictable way.
In our society, I see public media as a lever. It pushes people by elevating them and their sights. It brings them into more thinking and understanding, and it brings us together.
So I ask the nuclear powers to abandon the out-of-date thinking of the Cold War period and take a fresh look. Above all, I appeal to them to bear in mind the long-term threat that nuclear weapons pose to humankind and to begin action towards their elimination.
I really never stopped thinking about Ellen, because I just haven't felt that kind of energy with anyone in my life.
I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
I wanted to be famous. It's embarrassing to admit, but I came out to L.A. thinking it would happen in no time. I thought, 'Once they see me, they'll be so glad I came.' I always had a ridiculous amount of self-confidence about what was going to happen to me.
I think women athletes who have been successful need to help other sports, those sports that are just emerging. That's what I've been thinking about and looking forward to.
A lot of Polish and Russian Jews had this experience: they would emigrate, thinking they were on their way to New York. Then their captains would stop in Dublin and say, 'Everybody off.' They would leave, and by the time they discovered they weren't in America, they didn't have enough money to continue.
For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.
The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.
BBC TV gets hold of an idea and beats it to death until we're all heartily sick of it. They buy people without thinking what they're going to do with them. It's the wrong way around. What they should be doing is employing really good ideas people to come up with good ideas.
When we first started out we only had five or six songs we could play live, so if we ever got an encore, we used to do our cover of City High's 'What Would You Do?' We'd be playing it and people's mouths would be moving singing all the words, but they'd be thinking, Where is this song from? It's such a brilliant pop song but the lyrics are so dark.
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood.
A script is a unique literary form, because it's not the end product; it's a blueprint. If you're not thinking of that end product, there's going to be a disconnect.
For me, writing in public is actually super energizing and so much fun. Especially when writing can typically be really painful and certainly hard, and often, you're staring at the page and thinking, like, 'Uh, is this any good? What am I doing?'
