The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
The work evolves when you get another part, and then you're getting called on to solve difficult characters, to inject a note of humanity into them. It's more interesting for me to do that than to stand around and be sunny.
My work begun to spread out. And calls to the universities begun to take me out of my garden, you know.
In 1979, I received a phone call from Ansel Adams asking me if I would be willing to consider coming to work for him. I was teaching photography in Southern California at that point.
My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.
I work on the boundary between economics and statistics in this field called econometrics. Part of my interest is understanding how you use statistics in productive ways to analyze dynamic economic models.
The market system requires that people be committed and willing to work hard. Inherent with that is what I call a merit system, which I think gives people the greatest opportunity.
All of the problems we're facing with debt are manmade problems. We created them. It's called fantasy economics. Fantasy economics only works in a fantasy world. It doesn't work in reality.
I don't care who's No. 1 on the call sheet or how big my trailer is. I care about the work. I don't care who gets the laughs. I just care that the laugh comes.
Camus believed in dialogue and diplomacy, and enlisted his work as a philosopher to the need to find nonviolent solutions, whereas Sartre called for violent conflicts and justified terror.
When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.
After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.
I had lived in that part of London that used to be called Islington since I was eight. I attended a private school for girls, leaving at sixteen to work. That was in the year 2056. AS 127, if you use the Scion calendar.
If you can find a way to make a living doing something you enjoy, or a range of things that you enjoy, then it can scarcely be called work.
Well, I probably, I guess first became aware of the whole, what I call the nuclear complex or weapons work those kinds of things, right out of law school.
So I moved to Europe and only came back when directors like Robert Altman would call me after they'd seen my work in Full Metal Jacket.
I was called a misogynist because I was reducing women to mothers. 'Reducing women to mothers' - now there is possibly the most anti-women statement I've heard.
I have this dream that the first responders to 911 calls will not be law enforcement personnel but robots. Robots can put eyes and ears on the scene much faster than you can with policemen or women.
On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I've spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent.
Going to war against Iran - whether one calls such a move 'surgical' or 'total' - would be an extremely serious undertaking; with worldwide economic, military, diplomatic and human ramifications in both the short- and the long-term.
I can tell you this: If I'm ever in a position to call the shots, I'm not going to rush to send somebody else's kids into a war.
