I was around computers from birth; we had one of the first Macs, which came out shortly before I was born, and my dad ran a company that wrote computer operating systems. I don't think I have any particular technical skills; I just got a really large...
You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you g...
I was a TV producer at a noncommercial station, and we were producing some good documentaries - on Head Start, on poverty. But I was struck by the children, and the damage that poverty was doing to them. I didn't think filming them was helping much, ...
Honest to God, all my life I have had such a fear of spiders. In fact, I use to have a reoccurring dream about one. Very clearly, it was black with a red head. It would sit up in the corner of the bedroom and when it started getting closer, I would w...
I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head a...
I suffered a bout of depression that pushed me to reevalute things in my life, and I learned a lot about myself and the world and my spirituality. I sat at a piano, and the ideas fell into my head. I started playing, and I felt comfortable with my mu...
A friend of mine introduced me to Thurston Moore because she thought I would like him. He was playing with the tallest band in the world, the Coachmen. They were sort of like Talking Heads, jangly guitar, Feelies guitar. Anyway, it was love at first ...
When I'm in certain moods, a conversation will start up in my head, and suddenly I'll realize that the language has reached a very high and interesting level, and then lines and stanzas will just kind of appear, full-blown.
When we first believe we think we can do it all; our passion is so strong. But after a time we start to learn that passion doesn't equal strength, and our sinful nature rears its ugly head.
For lack of any clearer idea, I just started acting one day. It had been in the back of my head for a while, but I think in some ways I was afraid to do it, and finally I just stepped up.
It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starti...
SWAT Team Leader: You, in the window! Drop your weapon and put your hands on your head! Police Helicopter Pilot: [the Terminator starts firing minigun] Shit! That's a damn minigun!
Just once" Blay said softly. "Do it just once. So I'll know what it's like." Qhuinn started to shake his head. "No...I don't think–" "Yes" After a moment, Qhuinn slid both his hands up Blay's thick neck and captured the male's sturdy jaw in his pal...
[last lines] [in the waiting room, Betelgeuse is sitting next to a witch doctor, who is next in line] Beetlejuice: Pardon me. Did you do that? [points to explorer with shrunken head] Beetlejuice: That's very nice work. Let me ask you something. How d...
She wondered whether all marriages started out this way. Whether this initial stress and adjustment, push and pull and tremors and shakes were common to all relationships. Maybe the fact that they had started off as a long-distance couple had shielde...
The second the door closed after him Laire started jumping, a huge smile on her face and her body shaking in repressed excitement. “I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go. You don’t even like the Oracle. Let me.” Before the first words were out of Lai...
The Germans don't want us, or did you not get that when they started dragging people into the streets and killing them? We can't be Jews and Germans, not any more. You have to get that through your thick head, Japhet Buchanan. You're a Jew and only a...
I remember going through school and doing art, which was the only thing that I actually found fulfilling, and I couldn't really figure out why. Then I got into college and started messing around with photography, and I realised that it was about gett...
I started running around my 30th birthday. I wanted to lose weight; I didn't anticipate the serenity. Being in motion, suddenly my body was busy and so my head could work out some issues I had swept under a carpet of wine and cheese. Good therapy, th...
It was relatively easy to write 'The Cave of Lost Souls', though, because it came to me one night in a dream. I remember waking up and having this idea for a complete story - from start to finish - in my head, so I jotted it down, then later began wr...
Frank Morley, who had worked in London at Faber and Faber, was the new head of Harcourt Brace, and he hired me to start in 1940. The early years at Harcourt were wonderful. Almost my first assignment was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Between the Acts.'
