It's strange. No one ever really talked to me about my voice. People started writing about it, and I was like, 'What?' I'm really about my lyrics, but more people were talking about my voice. It's cool, but at first I got upset because I wanted peopl...
Even reading my first bad review was an awesome experience. It was cool because you make something and not everybody's going to like it. I felt like that kind of grew me up a little bit into a professional. I was a student filmmaker, and no one write...
I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.
If you spend your life with academics, when you step outside, you realise there is this huge general readership that is almost impossible to reach with critical writing. It is a rare critical monograph that gets a general readership, and if you spend...
I don't have an answer for why Hollywood still casts non-ethnic people for ethnic roles. It's something that has to change. Sometimes they'll write a character for a Native person and then say, 'Well, there's no Native actors that can capture the int...
I am writing to make sure that kids don't lose very important traits like curiosity that can drive social change because oftentimes I think parents emphasise more on doing well in school, which is important, but perhaps that sometimes comes at the co...
The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.
Even now, I change my style and clothes from one day to the next, but during high school I blended in. I think a lot of people are that way. I guess that's why I can write about an array of characters.
I was quite a successful evangelist. I've had people write to me and say, 'Gee, I'm a Christian because of you and I hear you're not a Christian, that's shocking to me.' I don't take these things lightly, but that's who I am. I can't change it.
Whenever I start a new book, I think, 'This is the most interesting subject of all time. It's sad, I'll never enjoy writing another book as much as I enjoy this one.' Every time, I'm convinced. And then I change my mind when I start the next book.
The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.
When I'm at home or in the studio, I have a 1963 Martin. It's a D-28, and I love that guitar. I write on that guitar, and it's the first guitar that I put a pickup in and ran through an amplifier, splitting the signal to the amplifier and a DI or in ...
I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care lat...
I write while my son is at school. At about 7:45 A.M., I walk him there, with the dogs, then walk them for another forty minutes or so, go home and chain myself to the desk a little before 9 A.M., and try not to be distracted until I hear my son plun...
Once you're done being president, you tend to want to defend your record more than plumb your inner feelings. I find it hard to imagine Obama going home at night and writing sensitive, introspective journal entries about his meeting with John Boehner...
One thing that makes me very happy is to have a complicated idea and to feel that I've expressed myself clearly. I remember writing the ending to 'Happier at Home.' I wrote the entire book to build to that ending 'now is now,' and what I had to say w...
I never thought about writing. I was married young, I was still in college, as we did then, and I had two babies before I was 25, and I loved them, and I loved taking care of them, but I was a little bit cuckoo, staying at home and not having a creat...
I wanted to write about women and their work, and about valuing the work we, as women, choose to do. Too many women I knew disparaged their work. Many working mothers thought they ought to be home with their children instead, so they carried around t...
I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fel...
Alan Alda and his wife Arlene are two of the most life-affirming people I've ever met. He espoused equal rights for women while producing, writing, acting in and directing 'M*A*S*H'; he used to commute between the set and home because he didn't want ...
I wanted to write something in a voice that was unique to who I was. And I wanted something that was accessible to the person who works at Dunkin Donuts or who drives a bus, someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father, someone who's...
