I feel great that I've been given a chance in the golden years of my life. To me, it's the last battle, and I've been given a chance to get stuck in some good armament, some good power, and there's a chance that now I can finish off my working years ...
If you don't have the good fortune to work a lot then you take any job you get offered, whether it's a good job, fun job, a bad job, horrible job, whatever, you just take what you need to take. But I'm lucky in that - at the moment anyway and hopeful...
Here's the miracle: I grew up thinking, 'Wouldn't it be great to write 'Superman' someday? Wouldn't it be great to create my own show, or work on 'Lensman,' or 'Forbidden Planet?' Those were very literally the goals I set for myself, the dreams that ...
I think now that I'm in the autumn of my life, and I'm getting a chance of having an overview and looking at the shape of how things happen, when things happen, why things happen, I think it was fitting that I spent most of my early career doing mask...
When I worked with M.I.A., who was, like, the coolest person back then, she was just a girl I met on the Internet. Or even when I met Azealia Banks on Myspace, I never thought, 'Oh, she's cool.' I just loved what she was doing. So I've always been li...
I never set out to become 'famous.' I mean, when you're 14 you think 'I'm gonna become a writer and people will want my autograph and that'll be cool,' but you grow up and you learn that's just not how the world works. I resigned myself to the fact t...
I am oblique; I think that has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will, so that finally...
If you decide you want to change your life around, it doesn't matter where you came from, what you did, if you were incarcerated or you are from the projects, if you are an uppity kid who came from a really wealthy family - and all of them do drugs a...
Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture's primary mode of communication, a radical change because images work so differently than words: They're immediate, they hit you at levels...
The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. There are many ways of supporting that, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attribu...
As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the or...
If my colleagues stop eating donuts and are more active, it saves me money on next year's insurance premium, and I get to work with people who have more energy and creativity each day. Yet most organizations fail to make health a cultural priority. I...
There are two tests in life, more important than any other test. On Monday morning, when you wake up, do you feel in the pit of your stomach you can't wait to go to work? And when you're ready to go home Friday afternoon, do you say, 'I can't wait to...
I quite clearly remember driving home at 9 a.m., after shooting all day, in a bathrobe, with bodypaint all over my face, and going through McDonald's drive-thru. I ordered a coffee to make sure I didn't crash on the way home. And the girl working the...
When I first discovered in the early 1980s the Italian espresso bars in my trip to Italy, the vision was to re-create that for America - a third place that had not existed before. Starbucks re-created that in America in our own image; a place to go o...
The whole time I was on 'Grey's,' I'm still reconciling myself to my 11-year-old son, because he never saw me during that time. By the time he got up, he'd see a dent in his pillow, but by the time I got home, he was already asleep. So for three year...
I'm up at 8:30 every morning, and I write from about 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. - with some breaks, of course. I really try to see writing as a career that I turn off when my husband comes home from work. Otherwise, writing could very easily become all-c...
My mother gave up her career bringing us up, and she has played a very important role in keeping us grounded. Even now I don't take my work home, my stardom home. It ends where it is supposed to end. There is a life beyond stardom, and it's a very no...
I sold my first short story while I was home on maternity leave, then began working on novels. Since I was reading and enjoying romance novels at the time, the first two unpublished manuscripts I wrote were both romances. I sold my third novel, 'Call...
First and foremost I am a commercial writer, and I hope to entertain people. But having said that, I'm in love with the relationship between humans and dogs, and the more I learned about what our military working dogs are doing, I wanted to at least ...
At AT&T, I learned an awful lot about people, and how important it is to have the right people in the right jobs. And when I say 'right people,' I'm not talking about their college degree or work history; I'm talking about things like bearing - How d...
