I don't want the world to dislike me in any way.

Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.

Writing is incredibly important to me as a way of handling the world, understanding how it works.

You know, I think becoming a parent has really changed the way that I feel impacted by what's going on in the world around me.

I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.

My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.

For me, there's no dichotomy between being shy or a performer, because I think it's more a way of slightly presenting a version of things to the world.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

Patience for me is a big thing. Patience with others. Patience with the way the world is evolving. I have a sense of urgency because I want to help out so much.

I think not having come from the DJ world was an asset to me at first because I didn't have some of the habits other DJs had, and I think in a way that set me apart.

For me, as an executive, I never tried to be something else. You pick up things from the Clive Davis and Sean Combs of the world, but you have to do it in your own way.

I guess, for me, the idea of finding an identity through creative means has always been a way to deal with otherwise feeling awkward and uncomfortable out in the world.

I think I take away a naturalistic approach to acting from doing 'The Larry Sanders Show,' a way to put aside acting and just exist in the world of what's being handed to me.

An editor named Kerrie Hughes wanted me to write a short story that brought my fire-spider Smudge from my goblin books into the present-day world. I came up with libriomancy as a way to make that happen.

As far as I'm concerned, if there is a supreme being then He chose organic evolution as a way of bringing into existence the natural world... which doesn't seem to me to be necessarily blasphemous at all.

I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.

It seems very clear to me that we, in the West, cannot afford to continue assuming propriety over the world's resources in a careless, greedy way without paying for it - not only with the lives of our loved ones, but also with our souls.

If you're struggling to make your mortgage payment, and you've got three kids between the ages of 12 and 18, and you and your spouse works, and someone says, 'Oh, by the way, the world's ending,' it's like, 'Please. You don't need to tell me that.'

Why on Earth would the United States ever want to be more like Europe? Correct me if I'm wrong, but we left, did we not? Not only did we leave that older, lesser world behind, but we left skid-marks along the way with an entire continent eating our proverbial dust.

One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf.

The natural world is the only one we have. To try to not see the natural world - to put on blinders and avoid seeing it - would for me seem like a form of madness. I'm also interested in the way landscape shapes individuals and populations, and from that, cultures.

My whole freshman year at Duke, it was drilled into me that nothing was given to you, and you have to earn it, and this is a dog-eat-dog world, and blah blah blah, and blah blah blah. And you buy into it, 100 percent. You end up loving it. That's the way it should be, right?

Contemporary paganism gives me a subjective lens through which the world in which I live can be interpreted on an aesthetic and an ethical basis. I'm interested in narrative, myth, and story, in folklore and the way we connect to the turning of the seasons and the natural world.

Personally, I don't like to talk too much to the actors about the camera choices because I feel like the way I want them to perform is as if it feels very rooted in the real world and that I'm essentially stepping back and just watching and hoping they feel safe with me watching.

With Yale, my world got so big all of a sudden. At school, if you could dream it, someone would make it so that you could do it. It was magical. I had a lot going on, as you do when you're 17, and didn't necessarily capitalize on all of it, but it made me see possibility in a way that I hadn't before.

Directing doesn't appeal to me. I'm much more in the world of ideas. My husband is a director, and I understand what it takes to direct. It's a skill set where you have to be able to talk to actors and understand them, and I don't. It's a very different way of being in the world, and I much prefer writing and producing.

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