When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.
I feel like I've had this ability to infiltrate, as an outsider and an insider, different groups.
I don't think anyone feels older. You have this infinity inside you that feels like it could go on forever.
I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.
We know there are certain types of viruses that are nasty - influenza, for instance, is an area that is not a blindside. But a lot of viruses have come out of nowhere, like H.I.V., or to a certain extent SARS. Because we know we have the potential to be blindsided, we really have to investigate the unknowns.
I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.
I would like to make sure, first of all, that our women in the informal sector - I mean, these are the farmers and the traders; many of them are not educated, many of them lacking literacy - be able to give them better working conditions. And we've done a lot to be able to achieve that.
Children take in more information than we'd like to believe.
I particularly like Twitter, because it's short and can be very funny and informative. It's a little bit like having your own radio program.
I've given up email. Well, almost. At the weekend I set up one of those auto-reply messages, informing my correspondents that I would no longer be checking my emails, and that instead they might like to call or write, as we used to in the olden days.
I'm really focused and obsessed with writing things that are specific. I don't like big rock lyrics - I find them infuriating.
Prada Infusion d'Iris perfume - my mother wears it, so it feels like home away from home. It's lovely to smell her scent at all times.
I saw I wasn't an ingenue like Debbie Reynolds.
They did cast me as an ingenue once, and the novelty was nice. But I said, 'There is nothing here to play!' I really like getting into the meat of a role.
For me, being Catholic was who I was and who I am, just like I'm Irish and Slovak. It's just so ingrained in us.
I've had my eyes opened to so many things. But still, all I really want to do is my truck job. It's like an ingrained, default setting.
A soul without reflection, like a pile Without inhabitant, to ruin runs.
What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite.
I think everyone's inherently snobbish. Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, 'Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good.' Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.
In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.
