I came in several times and spoke, but perhaps you were asleep when I thought you were awake.' 'You are very considerate to explain it this way,' Sugreeva said, 'but I was drunk
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to inve...
In the mid-1970s, there was this huge boom of stand-up comedy throughout North America. I went to see a show at a club called Yuk-Yuks, in Toronto, and I was just fascinated. I ended up coming back for amateur hour on a Monday at midnight and got up ...
I've been through the entire list of Polar problems. I knew it would be hard, but it's harder than I ever thought it would be. I've suffered from blisters, a high-altitude cough, frost nip, and I even managed to break a ski they told me was unbreakab...
I got to college and saw all of my friends going to these other schools and thought, 'You know, college is just a blank slate.' And I had an opportunity to go to different schools, but I chose Brown because it was unique and allowed you to be yoursel...
Though it's impossible for us to legislate one's thoughts and feelings, we still need things like affirmative action in place because without measures like it, people in charge would not have, sadly, enough impetus to do, as cliched as it sounds, the...
After I started getting criticism for doing 'Big Brother,' someone told me that Hugh Downs used to host 'Concentration' and Mike Wallace used to do 'The Big Surprise.' I thought, Huh, maybe that door isn't sealed shut if I want to do '60 Minutes' one...
I was never looking back in regret. I never thought, Oh, why didn't I become an actress? or Why did I just go paddling along after John? I've always walked along right by his side, and he's always supported everything I do.
Don't you think it's something strange that you rarely look at yourself in the mirror, except to do things like stand and ponder? I mean, in Shakespeare's day, it was thought that the mirror would reveal something, that it is trying to tell you somet...
I can sit here and say I've survived heart break and all those nights I thought I couldn't bare to live without you, yeah I just want to thank them, because I did & now I couldn't imagine a life with you.
I thought 'UnSouled' would come in at around 400 pages, but it took 650 pages, and even then I felt like I was rushing the conclusion, so I asked my editor and publisher if I could divide it again. So a sequel became a trilogy, and the trilogy became...
In fact I was slightly badly behaved at school and got in trouble. I would get a bee in my bonnet about something I thought wasn't right, and I would ape about too, to make everybody laugh. That was my way through my girls' school, because I wasn't v...
I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I ...
I personally never thought that 'Dallas' would resurrect itself because I didn't think anybody knew how to do it. And it was proven to me on the few attempts that were made. The movie that was going to be done, I read that script, it was atrocious. I...
It's quite ironic I suppose, it's that thing about being in a group when you all start out as friends and then invariably end up hating each other. So I just thought they needed telling really, in case they were labouring under the apprehension that ...
Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was ...
It's only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty...
Happiness is corny. It is a word you do not find in Dorland's medical dictionary. When people are feeling tops, really at peace with themselves and others, they are not happy. In the medical sense, in that condition they are thought of not as happy, ...
I thought that I would have a huge literary novel coming out when I was, like, 29. I quit my banking job, and I was halfway through my second novel - and I will never publish it, because it's very mediocre.
Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.
I was on the cusp - or thought I was on the cusp - of celebrity, the result of starring as an adorable curly-haired alien in the miniseries 'V' on NBC. 'V' was a hit, and then got green-lit as a series. During the hiatus, the only job I auditioned fo...