I feel a responsibility to try and give back. I see young people out there who are trained, and any way I can help them and give them an opportunity is gratifying.
It seems like a totally gratuitous myth to tell people a giant rabbit comes round at night leaving candy in a haphazard way around the house... and the cover shows the bunny caught in the act.
The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.
I am very thankful that I have lived the life I have lived. I am thankful for my Graves' disease, and I tell people, if I had my whole life to live over, I would have it, because it has really made me into the person that I am.
Some people talk about Haiti as being the graveyard of development projects.
I prefer a prison full of criminals than a graveyard full of innocent people.
If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.
The political graveyards are full of people who don't respond.
I write simply because I hear voices of people in my head who won't give me peace until I convey their stories to the rest of the world. Seriously. They've always been with me. While other girls played with dolls, and my brothers with Hot Wheels, I was busy traveling through space or traipsing through graveyards with my imaginary playmates.
Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up. Longitudinal studies following thousands of people across time have shown that most people only begin to gravitate toward certain vocational interests, and away from others, around middle school.
I believe that you should gravitate to people who are doing productive and positive things with their lives.
I do gravitate towards the sad songs because I find them to be more of a challenge for me from a writing perspective. There are things about those songs that do touch people in a way that a fun song can't.
That's how things work: you be who you are, and then people like you. They gravitate.
In sports, big names and celebrities drive events, and that's what people gravitate to.
The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that maybe other bands have - a specific idea of what they are and what their sound is.
I can do a good roast with my eyes closed. I'm amazing with gravy. That's my speciality; even other people ask me to do gravy at their house. I'm very proud of my gravy.
To wear a gray tweed suit, you have to be mature and confident in yourself. Some people can't pull it off.
It's not hard to get your way when it's your way or the highway. People either follow suit or they're not around. I don't really like the sound of that, 'cause that sounds like a temper tantrum. I'm just very black and white when it comes to my business. There's really no gray area.
Americans have an interesting conundrum, a black and white line: You're on one side or the other of Puritanism or licentiousness. But that gray area where people abide, between their ears or on the Internet, needs to be fleshed out more in terms of permission granted.
I find a lot of feminist reading quite confusing and that often there's a set of rules, and people will be like, 'Oh, this person isn't a true feminist because they don't embody this one thing,' and I don't know, often it can be a gray area, and it can be a hard thing to navigate.
