it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.
But in my own particular case, there was something that happened when I became a mother. Whenever in the news I saw an example of a child being abused or mistreated, my response went from being appalled to being physically revolted.
I still think that the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, just having no one... That is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.
I'm tired of being considered a lesbian writer, tired of being a science-fiction writer, tired of being a thriller writer. I'm a writer. Period. Story matters to me.
I did a lot of work with myself over the course of being pregnant and the first few months of being pregnant. It's nice, the pace of being pregnant; it gives you a long time to not just germinate a baby but germinate the mother that you're gonna be.
Most men are very attached to the idea of being male, and usually experience a lot of fear and insecurity around the idea of being a man. Most women are very identified with their gender, and also experience a tremendous amount of fear and insecurity...
I want to be able to experience everything. I want to experience being a husband, experience being a father, experience, maybe, hopefully, someday being a grandfather, and all those things. I want that experience. When I die, I want to be exhausted.
And I came away from that experience, and it was a very difficult experience - I came to understand that you have to practice at being a good father and practice at being a good husband, just as you have to practice at being a good journalist.
When I say that human beings are just gene machines, one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication, and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.
No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.
A photograph doesn't gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.
By the way, intelligence to me isn't just being book-smart or having a college degree; it's trusting your gut instincts, being intuitive, thinking outside the box, and sometimes just realizing that things need to change and being smart enough to chan...
As all human beings are, in my view, creatures of God's design, we must respect all other human beings. That does not mean I have to agree with their choices or agree with their opinions, but indeed I respect them as human beings.
Being a talented artist is good, it's nice, but it's not the most important thing. I think being a good storyteller, having a good idea, a good gag, is probably more important than being a great artist.
For some time, I thought being a producer would be a more fulfilling career than being an actor. But then I went to a conference in Cannes with 300 other producers, all desperately chasing finance for their projects... and realized being an actor was...
I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!
One of the downsides of being famous is that folks pay far more attention to you than they should. American celebrities are constantly under surveillance, and every word they say is subject to scrutiny. So, be careful what you wish for if you desire ...
I don't mean being famous is a perk, because one knows that it's not necessarily a perk, but there are certain perks to being well-known and respected in one's field. Public perks. Like, I don't know, general friendliness and willingness to please, j...
I went from being totally unknown and never acting professionally to being in a major movie and being very famous. It all happened so quickly, I didn't have any time to work things out. It's been pretty scary at times.
We need to accept that consumption is not the end goal of our life and stop measuring our well-being simply on the basis of earnings. We need to explicitly take the quality of our work-related life into account in judging our well-being.
Being a twin, and being my sister's twin, is such a defining part of my life that I wouldn't know how to be who I am, including a writer, without that being somehow at the centre.
