I take a real interest in the possibilities of teaching - including the practice of bringing creative writing, and serious reading, into the classroom. I am persuaded that since language is alive, much of the challenge has already been met by the poe...
with few apparent connections to Afghanistan as such, but there were no calls to bomb Riyadh (imagine if the hijackers had been Iraqi). Rather, Saudi Arabia is a favoured ally in the 'war against terrorism'. It is obvious that at stake here are US ge...
I try to stay away from stuff that's just action, action, action, action, action, and you kind of fast-forward through the dialogue scenes. I'm not interested in doing that. Give me a reason to fight, and I'll go there. But don't just make it, 'You t...
Everyone always wants to talk about 'True Blood' and 'Battlestar Galactica' - no one's even interested in 'Durham County.' It blew my mind when I came to Canada and no one asked me about the show. So many people didn't even know about it. They didn't...
I think that by following the route that I have tried to outline, one gets into a much more interesting and productive series of questions than those that result from saying simply that Chinese don't like milk because they don't like milk.
I am a former newspaper reporter turned church secretary turned vampire novelist. I wrote my first complete novel, 'Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs,' at night while I was working as the receptionist for a Baptist church. That was an interesting conversat...
I tried to be grown up but I have no interest in abiding by the adult rulebook. I want to do fun things that make me happy [...] You might call me a child. Good. For if adults had even the slightest in-the-moment joy of a child then frankly the world...
I feel like if I had my personality but was an OB/GYN, you would be psyched. You'd be like, 'My chatty, pop-culture-interested but plainspoken, wants-to-talk-about-clothes but serious-minded doctor.' I feel like I would clean up with patients. That's...
That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we...
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The onl...
The story of a man's soul, however trivial, can be more interesting and instructive than the story of a whole nation, especially if it is based on the self-analysis of a mature mind and is written with no vain desire to rouse our sympathy and curiosi...
I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.
Facebook is about seeing what your friend is doing. Twitter, you follow different people. Flipboard is about passions and interests and topics, and so it's the same social web that all of these products are letting you look at, but Flipboard is comin...
All of the films that I've made are about the country I live in and grew up in... And I think if you're going to put an artist's eye to it, you're going to put a critical eye to it. I've always been interested in the gray area that exists between the...
Have you heard of the most evil things done by people in their lifetime? They have coveted men's wives, killed hundreds of Christians and sold their best friend's life away for just a few coins. Isn't it interesting that they were God's chosen in the...
Our live set's become increasingly complex recently; we've been doing stuff that's been vastly too much information for most people to deal with and I think it's quite interesting watching how people behave in those situations, under those circumstan...
I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
Ironically, it is only when disaster strikes that the shuttle makes the headlines. Its routine flights attracted less media interest than unmanned probes to the planets or the images from the Hubble Telescope. The fate of Columbia (like that of Chall...
Somebody had given me a copy of 'Hunky Dory,' which had yet to be a hit, although it was starting to percolate. I'd seen a couple of pictures of David, with his interesting hairdo and outfits, and I decided to seek him out, which wasn't difficult bac...
I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology just had too much memory for me to be interested...
