When I was five years old, I told my parents that I wanted to take ballet. So, ballet was the focus of my life... until puberty. Then I discovered boys and started dating a guy with a mohawk who'd come to my ballet class and freak everybody out. Shor...
Now that virtually every career is an option for ambitious girls, it can no longer be considered regressive or reactionary to reintroduce discussion of marriage and motherhood to primary education. We certainly do not want to return to the simplistic...
The important thing to note is that it is not important whether Malala was shot or not - Malala is not asking for personal favors or support. She is asking for support with girls' education and women's rights. So don't support Malala, support her cam...
My personal life is the same. At the end of the day, this is just a job. I love what I do, and it's a great job. But it's like my alter ego. There's Chris Brown the singer. And there's Christopher Brown, the down-home Tappahannock boy that plays vide...
I don't think successful musicians were really put on this planet in order to have a great time, pat themselves on the back and say, 'Oh, what a clever boy I am!' I think that, like most artists, we were put on the planet to suffer just a little. And...
Wherever Mantle went in the great metropolis - Danny's Hideaway, the Latin Quarter, the '21' Club, the Stork Club, El Morocco, Toots Shor's - his preferred drink was waiting when he walked through the door. Reporters waited at his locker for monosyll...
I love a great melody and wonderful lyrics that speak from the heart, and my music has that and speaks about it; but there's just something that was really raw and energetic about the early House music. It's hard to describe. It's like you had to go ...
There is so much great talent in the underground, and electronic music is finally getting the props that it's deserved for so long. I feel like now that everyone is discovering it and it's so fresh sounding to so many people. It doesn't get any more ...
'Lost Boys' is one of my all-time faves. I just thought it would be great to be a vampire. I remember this movie called 'Once Bitten,' which is about an '80s sort of power girl who became a vampire and was really, like, sexy. Hair like she was from '...
I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but are lous...
We have a lot of suspicion of robots in the West. But if you look cross-culturally, that isn't true. In Japan, in their science fiction, robots are seen as good. They have Astro Boy, this character they've fallen in love with and he's fundamentally g...
The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in...
I grew up in a community where it was not the exception to be a good girl. It was sort of expected. And all of my friends were good girls too, and my boyfriends were good boys. Everybody was pretty nice. And that affects how I write my characters. Th...
So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.
My boy and I move. We have this game where if we dress in a particular item of clothing, we have to do a different movement. A hat means 20 jumps - that sort of thing. When I put a scarf on, my son has to drop down and do push-ups, immediately. He th...
I don't mind a little Sturm und Drang. When I was doing 'Riding in Cars With Boys,' I wouldn't smile at anybody, because my character, Bev, was angry at the world. I'm the opposite. Inside my head I'd be like, God, I'll explain to you at the end of s...
What can I say about 'The Lost Boys'? Oh my God: I love it; I hate it; I'm scared of it. I had a massive crush on them all when I was young. And I wanted to be a vampire. It's so stylized; it's the type of film I grew up on. To me, it's always at the...
Quick condemnation of all that is not ours, of views with which we disagree, of ideas that do not attract us, is the sign of a narrow mind, of an uncultivated intelligence. Bigotry is always ignorant, and the wise boy, who will become the wise man, t...
It's about how you exist as a person in the world, and the idea that your work is more important than you as a person is a horrible, horrible message. I always think about a little gay boy in Wisconsin or a little lesbian in Arkansas seeing someone l...
The first Elizabeth film was an absolute travesty historically. It really was sloppy. Things like 'The Other Boleyn Girl' and 'The Tudors,' people's perception is distorted because of these. It matters to me as a historian, because I spend my life tr...
The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.
