Look, nobody is ever exactly the same as anybody else. You're handed the cards you are for a particular reason, so you follow that path and see where it takes you.
It's hard to say that one way of doing things is the best for everybody all the time.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period.
Life is too complex to compress into soundbites. Every situation is different.
To extraordinary circumstance we must apply extraordinary remedies.
I think certain people are the way they are for certain reasons that we can't necessarily judge without knowing.
For me, a big part of writing psychological thrillers is choosing crimes committed for motives which would only apply to a particular person in a particular situation; a unique, one-off motive that is born out of someone's particular range of psychological afflictions.
The position of the Americans is quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.
As children we recognized that we belonged to an unusual, even exceptional, family, but the effect was different on each of us.
I think it would be self-indulgent to go, "Oh, I'm going to make this character different by giving him a quirk of some kind." I don't think that serves the story, particularly. But even very similar scenes with a different set of actors, a different set of circumstances, it starts to evolve as a different character.
Every man should have laws of his own, I should think; commandments of his own, for every man has a different set of circumstances wherein to work - or worry.
I think that I've had a very strange life.
Everybody's got their own situation and their own needs.
Each brain is exposed to different circumstances. It's very likely that your brain is unique in the history of the universe.
I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.
There again, that is a fundamental principle: no two situations are alike.
People often assume that the same approach will work for everyone, that the same habits will work for everyone, and that everyone has the same aptitude and appetite for forming habits, but from my observation, that's not true.
It's very easy to say, 'Well, hey, you should wake up at 4:30 in the morning and do what ABCD people do.' Just because it works for one person, just because it works for even many people, does not mean it will necessarily work for you.
There are no cookie-cutter solutions that you can apply from one circumstance to another. They're different. Our interests, as implicated, are different. The tools we have at our disposal are different.
Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.
There are a lot of big personalities in our family, and because of the way that we interact with each other - and the fact that the girls are beautiful, the little ones are adorable, and my husband is an Olympic champion - there was this perfect storm, where I think you kind of wanted to watch and go, 'Wow, what's happening with this family?'
… in history, so many circumstances of a small and accidental nature are relevant, that no broad and simple uniformities are possible.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston
Getting divorced was the right decision for me, but it's not the right decision for everyone else.
You always ask that. Why. Like there's an answer for everything. Not everybody has your life, you know, or your family. In your life, things happen for reasons. People make sense. But that's not my life. Nobody in my life makes sense.
