There’s no escaping it,” he’d been fond of telling us when he was well, “the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul, or your heart, but everyone else in the world will judge you on your big nose or your weak chin. Six...
At its best, fantasy rewards the reader with a sense of wonder about what lies within the heart of the commonplace world. The greatest tales are told over and over, in many ways, through centuries. Fantasy changes with the changing times, and yet it ...
The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you’re better off not touching it until y...
Rumors went round that I might be gay. In some ways, I was happy w/ this. Larry Rivers proved to me that a gay man could be wild, attractive, and courageous; in any case one's sexuality was becoming less of an issue every day. One of the great things...
I have always had a tendency to keep enlarging problems which I personally think is the way the world works... that seeing anything one dimensionally on the kinds of political, sort of big issues of human progress is going to be a distorted view of t...
...if we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his cameras by mule, and the person stepping out of his car to take a picture with an Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to c...
When speaking aloud, you punctuate constantly — with body language. Your listener hears commas, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks as you shout, whisper, pause, wave your arms, roll your eyes, wrinkle your brow. In writing,...
I never cease to wonder at the tenacity of water - its ability to make its way through various strata of rock,zigzagging,back-tracking, finding space, cunningly discovering faults and fissures in the mountain, and sometimes traveling underground for ...
She had more of me then I had of myself. We were both wild birds chasing the stars. We’d lose our way and find new places, close our eyes and fall back towards a constellation of dreams. We wrapped ourselves in a blanket of passion and each night w...
'Ghost City' was actually one of the few instances of non-fiction that I had written, and I felt that I probably said what I wanted. I think it must be different for every author; I haven't done very much of it, and perhaps, in a way, I found it rath...
I think one of the most important things we can do as feminists is acknowledge that, even though we have womanhood in common, we have to start to think about the ways in which we're different, how those differences affect us, and what kinds of needs ...
Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it w...
We have to rethink the way we light our cities. We have to think again about light as a default solution. Why are all these motorways permanently lit? Is it really needed? Can we maybe be much more selective and create better environments that also b...
It's kind of nice in some ways having an Olympic Trials where I finished second. You can kind of go in more under the radar facing a 2:03 guy and facing a lot of dudes who are faster than I am, whereas, before Beijing, I had one of the top 10 times i...
Importantly, companies are using social media to do things that go way beyond just chatting up existing customers on Facebook. Sales departments use social to nurture leads and close sales. HR posts job openings and vets applicants. Community and sup...
Man had created God in his own image, not the other way around. He had done it through sheer terror, and who could blame him? Unfortunately he had made too good a job. The god he had invented was just as cruel and careless as man himself. Not a deity...
For three million years we were hunter-gatherers, and it was through the evolutionary pressures of that way of life that a brain so adaptable and so creative eventually emerged. Today we stand with the brains of hunter-gatherers in our heads, looking...
I have not always chosen the safest path. I've made my mistakes, plenty of them. I sometimes jump too soon and fail to appreciate the consequences. But I've learned something important along the way: I've learned to heed the call of my heart. I've le...
If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon—because God has given us far many more reas...
I don't think people are meant to be by themselves. That's why you actually find someone you care about. It's important to let go of the little things, even if you can't let go all the way. Because nothing sucks more than feeling all alone, no matter...
A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can't innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is bec...
