I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
There has been an awful lot of time and money spent looking at the president over the last four years The American people saw through those investigations. They voted for the president. And despite all of this time and attention, nothing has turned u...
My first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers. And even after having published five or six books, I wasn't making enough money to live on, and was beginning to think I'd have to give up the dream of being a full-time writer.
This is the first generation to grow up on Thatcher - it's a different ethos. It's money minded, and it's the cult of yourself. Now that's fine, except when it falls down, and you can't achieve your goals - through high unemployment, through the fact...
Society has a hyper emphasis on thin, and that trend comes from the consumers - it does not come from the fashion industry. The fashion industry needs to make money; that's what we do. If people said, 'We want a 300 pound purple person,' the first in...
I've always been interested in both writing and music. When I first started getting published, I also worked as rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet, touring with them all over the U.S.A. and Europe - I wasn't making enough money from writing to s...
Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist t...
As exercise is necessary to the development of physical muscle, so development of the moral nature is accomplished through temptation. The soul being given choice, may exercise it in whatever direction it chooses, for it learns just as well by its mi...
As a very small boy, my passion was nature, and I had pets - cats, a dog and a bunny rabbit - and I wrote a very small book called 'My Pets,' filled with their photographs and a discussion about my pets and how much I loved them... That was my first ...
I was profoundly moved to be the first United Nations Secretary-General to attend the Peace Memorial Ceremony in Hiroshima. I also visited Nagasaki. Sadly, we know the terrible humanitarian consequences from the use of even one weapon. As long as suc...
I believe that the far-right and the far-left can be equally insane - but there's no question that in the first years of the Obama administration, the far-right has been far crazier. In part, this comes from parties being out of power - without the r...
Umpires got power, man. You ever notice if you go to a ballpark and there's a close play on first base, they will not run the replay at the ballpark? I've seen umpires go underneath and call up and say if you run one more of those replays, we're gonn...
The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was ...
Common would come to my house and give me a freestyle verse. I'd make a new beat for it and put it with something else. That's how I met Eminem - he came to my house back when he first started. He gave me a bunch of freestyles, and that's how we buil...
I was writing short films and I was going through this really, really, really terrible end of a relationship that I didn't want to be going through. It was too much for me to process and all of a sudden I had this idea for my first feature film and I...
People who supported Obama felt like they formed a relationship, that they were being spoken to. The way that campaign worked and the way he's worked during his first term is to make people feel like he's grasping their hand, whether it's by tweeting...
When I say 'yes' to a movie it's usually because, to a greater or lesser extent, it's because I'm enthusiastic about the character. How well that character ultimately comes off depends on a lot of things: your relationship with the director and so on...
My father was my first inspiration. He had an incredible stereo and a turntable, and I was told not to touch it. But I'd go back and touch it anyway. I gained a respect for the turntables when I was a kid. When I was a teenager, I came up with a 'cue...
I've started a company, called Tall Girl Productions, and we've got our first project that is purely producing, not writing, with a writer named Evan Daugherty. It's for NBC, it's called 'Afterthought,' and it's science fiction-ish. That's fun.
As a child I always steered clear of science fiction, but in the autumn of 1977, the bow-wave of publicity for the first 'Star Wars' movie had already reached me, so I was eager for anything science-fictional.
I've always wanted to write science fiction. It was one of my first loves, and I knew if I became a writer someday I'd probably write something in the science fiction vein, but I hesitated for a long while because it's such well-trod ground.
