The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
I'm old enough to have friends and contemporaries who have long since retired, and that's their prerogative - enough is enough; it doesn't mean a thing to me. But I haven't got any money, so, you know, I just keep on working.
Most of my contemporaries at school entered the World of Business, the logical destiny of bores.
My teacher, my great cello teacher Leonard Rose, was such a great cellist, and nurturing man, very patient. But I grew up not only admiring him, but obviously Casals, Rostrotovich, Jacqueline du Pre, and many others, including many of my peers and contemporaries.
I don't have stylistic loyalty. That's why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.
Anyone would be embarrassed of what they did at 15 or 16. I listen back to that first record, and I'm like, 'Compared to what my contemporaries were doing, it was crappy.' You listen to an early Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera song, and they are great pop songs. I just don't feel like on that first record I got anywhere near anything great.
The pyramid once passed there was still a short way to go before we confronted the Sphinx, in the middle of what our contemporaries have left him of his desert.
I am very ambitious and have set goals for myself. I really don't keep a tab on what my contemporaries are doing. I want to push myself as an actress and don't want to get into the rat race. With every film, I want to grow as a person and an actress. The character I play needs to change me in real life.
One of my contemporaries, a colorless chap who worked much harder at his law studies, is now Prime Minister.
I've been very lucky. I've written for most of my idols and the contemporaries.