I went nearly 30 years without being able to really seriously entertain marriage or a family. In fact, the word 'marriage' would actually give me a shake when it was brought up.
I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.
My wife and I both come from Irish families. There are two kinds of Irish families: the hitting kind and the kidding kind. If you're fortunate - and both of us are - you come from the kidding kind of Irish family.
Cars let us out of the barn and, while they were at it, destroyed the American nuclear family. As anyone who has had an American nuclear family can tell you, this was a relief to all concerned.
If we were to inspect ourselves or members of our family and our friends, we would see that we don't really have to go all the way overseas to be mystified - we can be mystified right at home.
Although I was raised in Canada and the U.K., my roots are in Egypt through my father, in a family line that stretches back generations and runs along the Nile, from the concrete of Cairo to the coast of Alexandria.
I imagine people might look at me and think 'Oh, she has been single-mindedly working on her career all these years and those family issues have fallen by the wayside', but that is absolutely not the case.
In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees.
Seeing the world around you clearly is a critical step in developing an idea for a business, carrying out that idea, and then thriving with an ongoing concern. Through choice, predilection, lack of education, impatience, or other causes, the entrepre...
Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is. And the faith to trust our own admission. The admitting is often very difficult.
We really only have two choices. Play it safe, or take a chance. For me, pulling back because of fear has always made me feel worse.
Climate change might be disastrous, but does that mean we want carbon taxes that raise the price of a gallon of heating oil to $10? And how exactly will those taxes affect economic growth?
Not merely can people like me write things that would never have been printed before but I think an enormously dramatic change has taken place in public opinion, possibly for the wrong reasons.
But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.
I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure.
Clinton saw himself much more as the steward of alliances and of consensus that moved in the right direction. He didn't see himself as someone who could change the overall thrust, I think, of global policy.
After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.
It seems pretentious to assume that we are not creatures of action. I think often it takes a situation of extreme absurdity, extreme action, to push us to the limits of what our character is, and to change us as people.
I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there - there's a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there's too much information.
Sureness is something like a neck brace, which we clamp around our lives, hoping to somehow protect ourselves from the frightening, constant whiplash of change. Sadly, the brace doesn't always hold.
History shows that people often do cast their votes for amorphous reasons-the most powerful among them being the need for change. Just ask Bill Clinton.
