I would love to be a field biologist. I would love to do what Jane Goodall did, just totally immerse myself in the life of one specific species for years and study every aspect of its behavior until little by little, all of these patterns become clea...
One of the great pleasures of going to see a Daniel Day-Lewis film: you haven't seen him in five years. Where have you been? So, it's a special event, right? Well, if you want to go see a movie that I'm in, it still may be a special event for you, bu...
We all have a hungry heart, and one of the things we hunger for is happiness. So as much as I possibly could, I stayed where I was happy. I spent a great deal of time in my younger years just writing and reading, walking around the woods in Ohio, whe...
I would have done well as a gypsy child, I think. A circus baby. I coulda played a great street urchin or ragamuffin. Or just been one. I certainly liked entertaining people and making jokes, but I don't know necessarily if that's what your child is ...
I do go back to Russia frequently, about twice a year. I hate the flight, but it's worth it. My parents have a home in a little village of 12 houses. It's not on any map, so unless you know it's there, you won't find it. Nothing works there; no Inter...
I've been supporting Help for Heroes for many years - I actually rode in their first-ever official fundraiser back in 2008. I have witnessed the great work that Help for Heroes do to support those who have suffered life-changing injuries and illnesse...
I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' ...
I had the impression from reading English literature that British women were great beauties, and I only had seen Julie Christie, and she was gorgeous and sexy. I don't know whether it was just my taste, but when I got to London, I went two years with...
I believe that one version of the good in life can be defined by the moments I sometimes had playing tennis as a sixteen-year-old. You'd be out on the court and for an hour, two hours, sometimes an entire roasting hot day, and every single thing you ...
A good two years after Hurricane Katrina I remember feeling so devastated and so ignorant that there was so much damage still left. I felt like here I was an American and this is an American city and the government hasn't done enough and people haven...
I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the ...
There is good evidence that Venus once had liquid water and a much thinner atmosphere, similar to Earth billions of years ago. But today the surface of Venus is dry as a bone, hot enough to melt lead, there are clouds of sulfuric acid that reach a hu...
It just tickles me still when you see Roger Clemens, as great as he is, throw a split-finger and the hitter just swings and misses. They don't see that ball that well. Jack Morris threw an awful good one and Mike Scott. There's a lot of great pitcher...
It was a good 15 or 20 years before anyone at Rand would be in the same room with me. They didn't want the question raised, 'What's your relationship with Daniel Ellsberg?' And not one of them wrote me a letter because they didn't want a letter of th...
I guess I worry about weird existential things, like how do we spend our final act. This is a very emotional question. I can't answer it without crying. I think, You're 56 years old, what did you do? You raised two good kids. What am I going to do no...
All sorts of other lies are being spread today, I do not know what else they will invent. I've heard that I'm of Jewish descent, but I found, I knew of my ancestors in Zagorje from around 350 years ago, and I said, maybe it would be good to have some...
I spent many years writing and directing in radio drama, so I am comfortable with an audience or a microphone, but I do worry about the blurring of an author's public persona with the work itself. A good 'performer' can make a mediocre book sound str...
If there's a 13- or 14-year old kid who is yearning for something beyond the social forces in his own world, in his own neighborhood, the library is the only place where he can go to find that. It was exciting and thrilling to me all the time I worke...
I didn't have cable television growing up; there were only six channels you could watch then. The only really good channel was channel 10, and they would play 'The Nanny Called Fran' every night for years. I've seen every episode 100 times. I would g...
When I read James Joyce, I'm not really interested in the Dublin of 1904. I'm interested in being in the presence of a voice and a sensibility underpinned by an authenticity which, I think, if you're a good writer, you can extract from the specific d...
Flying into a storm, even its outer edges, did not seem like a good idea to me. And this was no ordinary tempest. Everyone on the bridge knew what it was: the Devil's Fist, a near-eternal typhoon that migrated about the North Indian basin year-round....
