My Cape women are generally true to type - big hearted, motherly women who love the sea. My other characters, with the exception of the Portuguese, who I occasionally mention as Cape dwellers, are obviously drawn from the city types one sees in every...
The impossibility of a retreat makes no difference in the situation of men resolved to conquer or die; and, believe me, my friends, if your conquest could be bought with the blood of your general, he would most cheerfully resign a life which he has l...
Our grandparents' generation never expected too much out of life and, paradoxically, were happier for it. It never occurred to my granddad that he would enjoy work. He hated it from the day he walked through the factory gates at 14 to when he left at...
All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it's impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn't left an imprint through the generations. Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like...
Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at...
Marriage is a reflection of your life in general: how you treat people, how you argue, how secure you are in your own thoughts. How vehemently do you argue your point of view? With what disdain do you view the other's point of view?
Thanks to the Internet in general and social media in particular, the Chinese people now have a mechanism to hold authorities accountable for wrongdoing - at least sometimes - without any actual political or legal reforms having taken place. Major po...
In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, bot...
We aren't upset when Paramount makes a $200 million movie that flops, but if a charity experiments with a $5 million fundraising event that fails, we call in the attorneys. So charities are petrified of trying bold new revenue-generating endeavors an...
Well, you know, I have always had an issue with the whole weight thing with people in general because I happen to love how big women look. I mean, it's all a perspective. It's all an opinion, and I think sort of the Rubenesque, voluptuous body is a l...
I knew about 'Haunting Hour' and that it was basically the new 'Goosebumps'. When I got offered the role of Corey, I was really excited because I basically felt like I was going to be in a new generation of 'Goosebumps'. It was a lot of fun, because ...
I made the big turnaround in the early Nineties when I started hearing all the tenth generation punk bands like Green Day and Offspring and all those people. It just made me fall in love with punk again and remember my roots, and since that time I've...
It makes no sense rushing to become a parent if you are not going to be a good one. No child deserves anything less than unconditional love and positive guidance. Our nation and the world as a whole desperately need some generations of well nurtured ...
I'm drawn to New England because that's where my roots are, and I miss it. I come from many generations of New Englanders, and so, in my writing, I've been drawn back there to the landscape and the light and the type of personality that's revealed.
Everyone seems agreed that writing about sex is perilous, partly because it threatens to swamp highly individualised characters in a generic, featureless activity (much like coffee-cup dialogue, during which everyone sounds the same), and partly beca...
I have to be a lot more calculating because I'm a very private person. I actually really struggle with the attention; I'm generally a pretty shy kind of a person. So it's tough figuring out how to manage it. But there are ways of managing it, and you...
I don't want other people to decide who I am. I want to decide that for myself. I want to avoid becoming too styled and too 'done' and too generic. You see people as they go through their career, and they just become more and more like everyone else.
I'm inspired when I find out about something that I didn't know was a remake. An example is, of course, stuff like 'The Fly,' or 'The Thing,' or even 'The Blob.' For our generation, all those things, whether it was 'The Blob' or 'The Fly' or somethin...
It has long been known that the chemical atomic weight of hydrogen was greater than one-quarter of that of helium, but so long as fractional weights were general there was no particular need to explain this fact, nor could any definite conclusions be...
But these realities will make themselves felt soon enough and while I am certainly not asking you to close your eyes to the experiences of earlier generations, I want to advise you not to conform too soon and to resist the pressure of practical neces...
We face the most compelling era of mankind: exponential growth of new technologies, cheaper electronic devices and the globalization of knowledge, commerce, and ideas along with the rapid growth of emerging markets of colossal sizes will generate the...
