Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

We have such a long, familiar history with Peter Falk. The minute his mug is on that screen people smile.

Young girls and boys from all around the world let me know their personal story, and I can feel their smile through their words. To be able to look at those comments and just get encouragement from them and know that I am living the life that I'm supposed to is what keeps me going every day.

All of the narration in 'Smile' is first-person. Most of the books that I grew up reading had first-person narrators for some reason. My diaries were written in this voice, and since this story is autobiographical, it just felt like a natural extension.

The truth is, we all face hardships of some kind, and you never know the struggles a person is going through. Behind every smile, there's a story of a personal struggle.

From the dawn of history, science has probed the universe of unknowns, searching for the uniting laws of nature.

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.

It's true in everything, not just in drag: To be a success, you have to understand the landscape. You have to know thyself, and you have to know your history so that you can draw from people who have figured out the equation you are faced with. It's not rocket science.

History will judge harshly my Republican colleagues who deny the science of climate change. Similarly, those Democrats who would use climate change as a basis to regulate out of existence the American experience will face the harsh reality that their ideas will fail.

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.

I think horror or science fiction is another way of telling a modern myth - it's like Ancient Greece; it's like kids couldn't wait for the next 'Orpheus' story, the next 'Jason and the Argonauts.'

I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness.

I think we've lost the idea that politicians are part of the humanities. And we think of them as part of a natural science tradition, and we don't expect them to have the contact with literature, with history, with the richness of descriptive language that the humanities have always stood for. And I think that's a great loss.

My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.

In 'Nier Automata', the protagonists are androids, not humans, and that's very common in a Science Fiction story.

Nixon has enough to overcome in terms of his legacy and his political history. Now he has to overcome the in-fighting between his daughters. It's so sad. There's another obstacle for him to clear.

I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

The history of apartheid-era South Africa is incredibly sad and at times infuriatingly incomprehensible.

That's what is so great about being able to record a 13-song album. You can do a very eclectic group of songs. You do have some almost pop songs in there, but you do have your traditional country, story songs. You have your ballads, your happy songs, your sad songs, your love songs, and your feisty songs.

This is how sad my life is: I got a scar from scratching my chicken pox too much. That's my big scar story. I really have no major scars.

Scientists habitually moan that the public doesn't understand them. But they complain too much: public ignorance isn't peculiar to science. It's sad if some citizens can't tell a proton from a protein. But it's equally sad if they're ignorant of their nation's history, can't speak a second language, or can't find Venezuela or Syria on a map.

'Sunset Boulevard' - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties.