I sometimes get asked: 'How come the men in your stories don't have such strong characters?' And I'm like: 'I don't care.' I just want to find out about all the different lives a woman can live. But my feminism has never been against men. It's not er...
I have two different categories of favorite films. One is the emotional favorites, which means these are generally films that I saw when I was a kid; anything you see in your formative years is more powerful, because it really stays with you forever....
When one teenager dying of cystic fibrosis asked me, 'Why am I different?' I answered, 'Tony, because it makes you beautiful.' He loved my answer because he knew full well how much he had done for the world and that he would be immortal through his l...
We all live on so many different levels and understandably present just a small portion of ourselves in most of our everyday relationships. So as a novelist, I'm always intrigued by what's the real story, what's really going on behind the front door ...
There ́s a metaphor which I love: living like a drawing compass. As you know, one leg of the compass is static, rooted in a place. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a wide circle, constantly moving. Like that, my fiction as well. One part of it is root...
I am interested in seeing how a certain situation can develop with potential accidents. First, I am inspired by the acts of potential collaborators. It tends to be an action they have already done in a different context. I am very clear about the rul...
When I first thought of the idea for 'Sweet Valley High,' I loved the idea of high school as microcosm of the real world. And what I really liked was how it moved things on from 'Sleeping Beauty'-esque romance novels where the girl had to wait for th...
The difference between me and other people is that they all walk around with onion skins wrapped around them. Pre-meditations, pretentions, the faces that they present to the world, the faces that they present to themselves.. onion skins that come in...
I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of...
You think that it’s not magic that keeps you alive? Just ‘cause you understand the mechanics of how something works, doesn’t make it any less of a miracle. Which is just another word for magic. We’re all kept alive by magic, Sookie. My magic�...
Books can make a difference in dispelling prejudice and building community: not with role models and recipes, not with noble messages about the human family, but with enthralling stories that make us imagine the lives of others. A good story lets you...
My husband and I grew up with parents who supported our passion, and we're grateful to them for that. It really helps you find your identity when you're younger. It helps you become a really well-rounded person, the more you can show from different p...
You know, you have a lot of people - I've met a lot of people in the past, I've gone to private schools, you know, encountered different people who think that it's OK to make comments, insensitive comments about your race because they're joking. And ...
discovered in a series of beautifully executed researches the fundamental distinction between carbons that turned on heating into graphite and those that did not. Further related this difference to the chemical constitution of the molecules from whic...
If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, in thei...
It was a gradual process, realising I was different. I remember at primary school getting a worksheet with sums printed on it. I thought that they must have run out of the right colour inks and sizes for the numbers, because they were all the same, w...
Well -- think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no -- hang on -- this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing ...
We are like fruitflies, measuring everything in terms of our own lifespan. But since our lifespans are so short, our perspective is entirely wrong. God, who inhabits eternity, sees things differently. He knows that our lives are just a mist. We shoul...
In video you are starting with nothing but a black screen. There's no game there. With pinball you at least start with that basic concept, but not with video. The challenge of going from no game to something today is only different because you have t...
It has been a wonderful experience to compete in the Olympic Games and to bring home a gold medal. But since I have been a young lad, I have had my eyes on a different prize. You see, each one of us is in a greater race than any I have run in Paris, ...
When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we're really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don't have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from diffe...
