With a story, as with a well-chosen gift, we’re happiest when surprised by something we didn’t know we wanted.
Brainchild” is an odd word. You hear it a lot in explanatory voiceovers and I suppose I was trying to join in, but I don’t really like it. I’m not keen on the idea that my brain could have a child. Would it be made of brain – a child, made of grey brain, like a squelchy zombie? As metaphors for inspiration go, I prefer the lightbulb.
The downside is the fear of something happening to her. The pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean. I hope that you do, for your sake. It’s a worry I’ll have to learn to live with because I’m definitely out of wishes.
What women want is still what it’s always been: either you or, more likely, not you.
Evil is in the eye of the beholder.
So we surrender to stupidity, do we?” Freedom of speech is sacrificed at the altar of manufactured rage.
Our level of expectation is crucial to our enjoyment of food, wine, holidays, plays, films and TV shows. We flatter ourselves that we’re objective but our judgments are clouded by our hopes, by whether something was better or worse than we’d anticipated.
In an increasingly virtual world, feelings are as valid as facts.
Mediocrity is fine if you accept it.
That’s why I’m so proud to live here. London, more than any other city on earth, is the new Rome – so much so that Rome is in some ways just the old London.
Every generation must lose its innocence, must see the brightly painted nursery wall smashed away by the wrecking ball of betrayal to reveal a blighted landscape. For our predecessors, it was the Somme, the Great Depression, the Holocaust or Vietnam; for my generation, it was The Phantom Menace.
One of the reasons I’d been attracted to showbusiness in the first place was that I thought, most of my experience so far having been of the theatre, that it was a profession that ring-fenced the lie-in. I didn’t mind the idea of working in the evenings, maybe of rehearsing in the afternoons, but mornings, I felt, should be the preserve of sleep, tea and paracetamol. So the realisation that television, the medium I most wanted to work in, required such punishing early starts was a bitter blow.
When watching the news, it’s so easy to forget what most of us are like: pleasant, polite, socially shy. We don’t want rows, we want a quiet life. We feel inadequate because we don’t protest and argue more – we don’t stand up for ourselves. And, in feeling that, we forget that the sort of people who do stand up for themselves are cut from the same cloth as the sort of people you have to stand up to.
Only a homeopath could believe that such a microscopic quantity of justice could have any beneficial effect.
What separates us from the beasts, apart from fire, laughter, depression and guilt about killing the odd beast, is our curiosity. We’ve advanced as a species because we’ve wanted to find things out, regardless of whether we thought it useful. We looked at the sky and wondered what was going on.
If academic endeavour had always been vetted in advance for practicality, we wouldn’t have the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap.
Society doesn’t function well unless we have shared references. When turning up at a new job, university or party, we all rely on mentioning TV characters like Spock, Bagpuss or Hitler in the confidence that others will know what we’re talking about.
If you’re ever going to throw a book at a wall, it’ll be during the next few pages.
It takes quite a leap of self-importance to decide: “I’m going to put a stop to that!
The media’s obsession with conflict means that we’re confronted with it so relentlessly that we’ve stopped questioning why it’s there in the first place.