When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the ...
So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier te...
I do feel Scottish in some way. Maybe it's to do with visiting my grandparents here every summer as a child, but I am aware of my Scottish ancestry. It's there all right, but it would be pushing it to label me a Scottish painter. Or, indeed, an anywh...
We've come a long way since 'Beowulf.' In the twentieth century, a strain in children's and YA literature offered the humorously conceived cozy dragon, a sometimes bumbling friend and guardian figure. Starting as early as Kenneth Grahame's 'The Reluc...
Between 2001 and 2011, Brazil lifted 20 million people out of poverty and into its growing middle class, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century Botswana's gross domestic product per capita grew faster than that of any other country on the p...
I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts. I do not believe that the Armed Forces of the United States are well served by a saying through our policies that it's OK to be immoral in any...
is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems,...
Girls like Diana Spencer, armed with nothing more than a guinea-pig-rearing certificate, proud to say in that old Sloane way that she was 'as thick as two short planks,' became the exception as girls from Benenden and Downe House started to fast-trac...
The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth - that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our re...
There were dozens of people who walked through the Holy Land claiming to be the Messiah, curing the sick, exorcising demons, challenging Rome, gathering followers. In a way, there's nothing unique about what Jesus did. In fact, many of these so-calle...
Why are they like that?' I asked Cico. We skirted Blue Lake and worked our way through the tall, golden grass to the creek. 'I don't know,' Cico answered, 'except that people, grown-ups and kids, seem to want to hurt each other - and it's worse when ...
When they offered me 'Wayne's World 2,' they said: 'We were going to give this to another actor, then we thought we'd see you'. I just thought: 'Surely you always had me in mind for that just in the way that it's written?', but they never admitted it...
The world of TV debates is antiquated. What looked smart and modern in 1960, with Kennedy versus Nixon, looks quaint and over-rehearsed between Obama and Romney. We need a new format; even if we have the same moderators and candidates, there needs to...
When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.
A key ingredient to achieving your goals is to make sure your goals are totally congruent with who you are as a person. Your head and hearts desire must match. It's such an important step in goal achievement and if we miss it, we can end up travellin...
As a filmmaker, like any artist, when something affects me emotionally I think about it in those terms. It's my way of dealing with my thoughts, my fears and my hardships. I think the same can be said with any artist. For a musician, you're going to ...
For those of us who cry out for gun control, our fears cannot be eliminated as long as the country remains an armed camp in which the most troubled among us can find ways to appropriate one of the easily available weapons in all our communities.
In the end I sort of though we created a companion who was so alive and dynamic and so wedded to the doctor that you’d need a whole universe to contain her in. The only way to get rid of her is to send her into a parallel world from which she can n...
Bunkum and tummyrot! You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he'd said 'What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?' He wouldn't even have start...
Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren't yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic's day consists of tryi...
I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I w...
