I actually think the same things do make most people happy. The differences are extremely small, and around the margins. You like peach ice cream; I like strawberry ice cream. Both of us like ice cream much better than a smack on the head with two-by...
Through having different conversations, I have 'real-eyesed' how common and easy it is to make decisions based on unquestioned belief systems, traditions and concepts we were raised with...by the very same humans who followed the exact same unquestio...
What was destiny? What was the power that shaped the patterns and attempted to enforce them? God? Should she be raging at God - or begging Him to let her son live and to spare her from the life of a cripple? Or was the power behind destiny merely a n...
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhap...
With my earlier books, I got quite bored being with one protagonist all the way through. With the Alex Morrow books, I wanted to do something a bit more holistic, so there were lots of different points of view, and I wanted to look at aspects of crim...
If I'm going to do a big film, I'm very choosy about what I do, because I think I want to continue - in fact I'm sure I want to continue - to stay in the realm of independent films with directors and writers who are just emerging with new ideas and a...
We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections. . . . Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes i...
I often put any project I write in a different decade just to roll the thought around in my head. There's a thriller I've written that I think would be nice to set in the '70s or '80s, just to take cell phones away from the movie. There's nothing lik...
When I was growing up in Terrell, Texas, I felt that it was not where I was supposed to be. I knew that I was meant for a different destination. I think that the minute I was born, there was something inside telling me where I would go, it's like ene...
Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start w...
The chimpanzee study was - well, it's still going on, and I think it's taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we're simply not as different from the rest of the animal kin...
The real debate about both the horrific inequality in the world and about the terrorism and frightening instability in the world requires analysis of the differences in upset-adaption or alienation-from-soul between individuals, races, genders, gener...
To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of the rocks the annals...
If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's ...
Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people ...
Milo Tindle: We are from different worlds, you and me, Andrew. In mine, there was no time for bright fancies and happy inventions, no stopping for tea. The only game we played was to survive, or go to the wall. If you didn't win, you just didn't fini...
The whole - it's the economy's bad. It's bad for everybody. I have my own comedy club. I opened it three years ago in a horrible economy. I created jobs. And we just started breaking even after a year and a half, barely. For that entire time, I have ...
Did you know there's a difference between being busy and being fruitful? Did you ever stop to think that just being busy - running around in circles all day but not accomplishing anything - is the same as wasting your time? It's frustrating to expend...
When you've got four people to get dressed to get out the door, you don't really tend to spend a lot of time on yourself. But that's the way I roll anyway. I was never one to do my hair and make-up just to go down to the market, so it's really not th...
The more I act, the harder it gets, since I feel like I still have so much to learn. Whenever I embark on a new project, it always feels like the first time. If it were easy to me and I felt like I knew everything, my acting might have been different...
Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write - eight months for 'Seesaw Girl,' eight months for 'Shard,' three years for 'When My Name Was Keoko!' The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether eac...
