If you write any kind of fiction about America, you immediately have to start doing some research about guns, so in some ways, 'Gun Machine' is just the culmination of 20 years of reading about guns.
I've got no dark secrets, I wasn't beaten up, my parents were kind to me and there was a low crime rate where we lived. Maybe that's where the comedy comes from, as some sort of reaction to the safe, boring suburbs.
There'll be moments when I'm out in the prison yard, chatting with the cast and the crew, getting ready to shoot a scene. And then I'll remember if I were actually an inmate, I'd only be out there an hour. The other 23 hours of the day, I'd be in my ...
Sitting over words Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing Not far Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark The echo of everything that has ever Been spoken Still spinning its one syllable Between the earth and silence
I became an inventor by accident. I was out of the Air Force in 1956. No, no, that's not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new ki...
Because I am interested in the growth and development of early hominids, I play with my kids, you know, looking at their teeth or measuring their heads, which they like also, because it's kind of fun.
From middle school to the first year of high school, I went to a school in Miami that seemed like a private country club. The whole cheerleader, football player, clique-y thing there was terrifying. Those people were so scary. They're the scariest ki...
I remember how a man once got in touch with me to tell me that he was so engrossed in my book that he had to take a day off from work just so that he could finish reading it. Such kind of responses from my readers is extremely endearing, and it keeps...
I was still closeted, but from the day I decided to run for office, knowing that I was gay, I decided that I would, of course, still be closeted but that I would work very hard for gay rights. It would be totally dishonorable, being gay, not to do th...
I believe that writer's block is a symptom. It's not a disease, it's the symptom of a disease. So what I try to do is kind of do it like 'House'; write down the symptom and write down the other symptoms. Try to work backwards to figure out what the p...
Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowin...
We've gotten a long way on missile defense. We know how to do it. We know how to take down incoming warheads, but we need to do a lot more work in order to be - to deploy a system that'll defend the United States against those kinds of limited strike...
It may come as a surprise, but Frou Frou was really like a kind of little holiday from my own work. Guy and I, we have always worked together, and then over the years, it became clear that we wanted to do a whole album together. It was very organic a...
The general manager is kind of like the step into darkness when you reach the top of the league. As GM, you're responsible for everything, including the maitre d's and the sommeliers - all these people who have their own agendas. But you probably mak...
I've continued to write fiction since being in television. TV is a different kind of writing, but it's all writing. It was David Milch of 'Deadwood' who helped me to see it that way. We later collaborated on the short-lived 'John from Cincinnati,' bu...
Square is turning informal, cash transactions, like you would do with a taco truck, into card swipes. Stripe is more for the Internet, it's focused on the kinds of transactions that weren't possible years ago. We think about how you would buy things ...
Once I moved to Chicago and started trying to get acting jobs, I just tended to book more things that were comedically based than anything else. I never had the preconceived notion, 'I will be a comedic actor.' I just thought, 'I'll go into acting an...
It's tempting to think, 'This is silly. I'm an artist. I care about my work, my work is first. I don't care about what kind of dress I wear... That's so secondary to me.' But if you care about your work... then you need to take this part of it just a...
We work crazy hours in Silicon Valley; my wife says we're all kind of diseased in some way. We're totally obsessive compulsive - when we see an idea, we're like, 'let me in, it's so much fun.'
I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It's like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I'd like to play strong women who are also v...
I can't live in a world where there are only, like, four kinds of women. Or where every woman is obsessed with cake. The very least I ask is that we have one female character in the world who likes savory things! I don't have any role models who like...
