The Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules - the first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.
It took me a long time to understand the relationship between ideas and between objective facts. But after I clearly understood this relationship, I didn't fool around with other wild ideas. That is one of the main reasons why I just make my scheme as simple as possible.
Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine.
I'd like to create a lovable character for schizophrenia; it doesn't have a celebrity spokesperson because by the time somebody's schizophrenic they've lost all their teeth.
There is a certain comfort that comes from feeling intellectually apart from phenomena. That you have the luxury of time to reflect or apply scholarly thinking to art and culture.
But if you really want to get involved in making a difference, you can stay at home with your family and have a job and make a reasonable living without having to be on an airplane all of the time, then you ought to go back home and run for School Board.
Over at the Olivia Pope & Associates set, we're like middle school children. Every time there's a cut in the action, we joke and dance around; there's show tunes and fart noises.
What I will remember most from my time in NATO is meeting children in the countries where I've gone to, to Moscow and to Kiev, I've met school children.
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
In my situation, every time I write a sentence, I'm thinking not only of the people I ended up in college with but my siblings, my family, my school friends, the people from my neighborhood. I've come to realize that this is an advantage, really: it keeps you on your toes.
All I want to do when I have time off is to have a laugh with my school friends and go down the pub.
It wasn't until high school that I actually started writing. I was in a lot of the school plays and musicals, and there was a lot of down time during rehearsals. I would go into the orchestra pit and mess around on the grand piano.
We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.
Junior and senior high school years were not a good time.
Strangely enough, through all those school years I decided at 13 or 14 I was going to be a musician and so school was just something to get out of the way, a waste of time and not to bother with it.
I was born in Evanston, Illinois. I spent my elementary and part of my junior high school years in a D.C. suburb. And then I spent my high school years in Minnesota. And then I spent my college years in Colorado. And then I spent some time living in China. And then I spent three years in Vermont before moving down to Nashville.
We were only there for five days and during that time Tom was a bit annoyed that the French were more interested in me and my schoolgirl outfit than him and his long scarf.
Only time, education and plenty of good schooling will make anti-segregation work.
I say all the time I think there should be some courses in the regular schooling system that isn't, even like about credit, things that matter later in life. I learned the harder way: 'Look, I got a $500 credit card in the mail, let's go shopping!'
My health and schoolwork come first. I work hard to get lots of sleep, but I probably work just as hard to spend time with friends.
