I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work I really wanted more than anything else to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

They are few in the midst of an overwhelming mass of brute force and their submission is wisdom but for a nation like England to submit to be robbed by any invader who chooses to visit her shores seemed to me to be nonsense.

When I was in Pulp I actively did more TV stuff because that was during the Great Britpop Wars and it seemed important to prove that indie people could speak. That war doesn't exist anymore.

The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

In the months leading up to World War II there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

I got this idea about being afraid to let go of something and being afraid of sinking into a state of almost anesthesia where you have to trust other people. Just the paranoia of it all. And it seemed to suit the frenetic track. So I just wrote it out and you know said it.

For many years it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months travel the world through coups d'etat assassinations famines massacres and tsunamis and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.

From a technical point of view there seemed to me to be absolutely no reason why - with the existing technology - we couldn't do very high quality audio because whereas the boom in digital graphics is ongoing the boom in digital audio has already happened.

I went to a Catholic high school and it seemed like every time I drew something for a class project it either got thrown away by the teacher or something.

The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land.

If I had permitted my failures or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success to discourage me I cannot see any way in which I would ever have made progress.

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

When I seemed to be irritable or sad my father would quote the learned Dr. Knight and then say 'Just go to sleep.' Like all smart aleck kids I thought the advice was silly. But as I've grown older I've realized just how smart Knight was.

It seemed romantic but also tragic - people would be winning but then lose it all or crash but fight on break bones but get back on their bikes and try to finish. Just getting to the end was seen as an achievement in itself.

The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the terrible outbreak of the Wars of Religion.

The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion.

For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.

I did not want to reject religion as nonsense because life seemed to have no ultimate purpose without it and most of the good people I knew were Christians.

I was 21 in 1968 so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies in the West anyway would have seemed absurd in 1968.

In the beginning New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.

I hope I presented what I felt the woman seemed to be about but I couldn't give any reason as to why she remained in the relationship other than that their relationship was very special.

I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be - although I think he had more going on under the surface as well.

The Russians are turning east to the Chinese - to the Europeans' surprise. It always seemed to me that the relationship between Russia and China would shift from being based in Marx and Lenin to being based in oil and gas.

Thus at the beginning of 1906 it seemed to be established that the emitters of the spectral series of chemical elements are their positive atomic ions.

Robert Kennedy was such an inspiring figure. His interest in politics seemed to come not from a desire for power but from a need to help our society live up to its ideals.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too and that was a wonderful little fizzy sort of world.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

Self-Realization Fellowship seemed like training. It was the training ground for finding a sense of peace in myself. Because that's my job. It's no one else's.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms I move through them yet in metaphysical ones they seem to move through me.

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the world.