When you have controversial parents, people have expectations about you. If every day at work I thought to myself, 'How does this relate to them?' I'd be paralyzed.
Biennial culture is already almost irrelevant, because so many more people are providing so many better opportunities for artists to exhibit their work.
Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true; we play because we are wired for joy, it is imperative as human beings.
I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.
The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.
My work has taken me from historical research to involvement in electronic publishing ventures to the directorship of the Harvard University Libraries.
I had lived in that part of London that used to be called Islington since I was eight. I attended a private school for girls, leaving at sixteen to work. That was in the year 2056. AS 127, if you use the Scion calendar.
While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us.
I think one of the reasons Stephen King's stories work so well is that he places his stories in spooky old New England, where a lot of American folk legends came from.
I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.
It is said that a hundred gamecocks will live in perfect harmony together it you do not put a hen with them; and so it would have been with Billy and Bob, had there been no women in the world.
Women have had the vote for over forty years and their organizations lobby in Washington for all sorts of causes; why, why, why don't they take up their own causes and obvious needs?
I know that at literary festivals I'm speaking mostly to middle-class women, who frequently vote in a way that is contrary to how I'd like them to vote.
The women's movement hit my neighborhood like a freight train. Everybody got divorced. You wonder what would have happened to women if the suburbs hadn't been built.
Rules like 'don't wear white after Labor Day' or 'shoes matching the handbag' are antiquated. Modern women should feel free to experiment.
I wanted to write a sci-fi story that would appeal to young women. Loads of girls like sci-fi, but it's more culturally associated with guys.
If women want any rights more than they's got, why don't they just take them, and not be talking about it.
So long as you create laws that define women as victims, as creatures that demand protection, that need bodyguards, you are going to perpetuate the very worst of our sexist past.
All good art, to me, is uncertainty.
No good story is quite true.
You change your mind-set, and as long as you've got a good mind-set, you'll know everything is good.
