Quotes on ID

I knew I wanted to write novels, but I could not finish what I started. The closer I got, the more ways I'd find to screw it up.

My wife, Keisha, came home once, and I had these violinists playing for her, and I'd prepared dinner for her, and I write poems. She's pretty amazing, so I like to celebrate that. She's really taught me how to celebrate life; that's something I've learned.

People pitch me all the time. But hopefully, you'll just go ahead and do it. We are trying to eliminate the need for pitches. I'd rather sit there and applaud. Customers buy products, not Powerpoint presentations.

I do not have bad days. I don't wake up in the morning and think that I'm going to get AIDS. I don't dream bad dreams about it. If I did, I'd be giving in to the negativity.

I'd be so fascinated to talk to a psychologist or sociologist about the deep psychological impact of seeing oneself represented. I don't think we've really touched the surface of what it does to the psyche of a people if the only image of you out there is negative. Or if it's never out there.

I'd like to see fashion slow down a bit. What freaks me out about fashion today is the speed - the speed of consuming, the speed of ideas. When fashion moves so fast, it takes away something I always loved, which is the idea that fashion should be slightly elusive. Hard to grasp, hard to find.

I'd love to be an artist always, but if no one wants me, I'd love to write songs for other people, be a manager, nurture new talent.

I've stopped war reporting. I realized that I'd answered all of my questions about war and about myself.

I'd look at one of my stonecutters hammering away at the rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet, at the hundred and first blow it would split in two, and I knew it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

I cannot live a life where I'm deprived. I'd much rather be five, 10 pounds heavier. With my luck, I'll get myself to that perfect goal weight, and I'll get hit by a bus. Then I'll be like... looking at myself from some afterlife going, 'You idiot. You could have had that agnolotti, dummy.'

I'd rather there wasn't an afterlife, really. I'd much rather not be me for thousands of years.

Since childhood, I'd dreamed of making a film, but producers in France and Germany wanted to make commercial films with chinoiserie. I refused.

I'd applied to graduate school for playwriting, and I got rejected by every school. I felt that theatre was closed but that, when it came to film, the door was very slightly ajar. If I have any virtues, it's that I'm good at walking through doors that are slightly ajar.

I'd been raised Mormon, but there comes a time where you are not following what you've been taught, but discovering for yourself if it's true.

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.

I'd been in jail, and I'd been beat. I had been to a voter registration workshop, you know, to - they were just training and teaching us how to register, to pass the literacy test.

I always thought I'd eventually learn how to draw really well, and despite constant evidence to the contrary, I just kept on trying. If you're too good at anything, you don't have to think about the process, whereas I feel like I spend my life with my head under the bonnet, trying to understand how everything works.

They told me that, as a woman, I'd never get into graduate school in physics, so they got me a job as a secretary at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and promised that, if I were a good girl, I would take courses there.

I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them.

Success always necessitates a degree of ruthlessness. Given the choice of friendship or success, I'd probably choose success.

Even if a story has nothing to do with my life, if I can recognise something of myself in the character and think, 'Oh yeah, that's what I'd do...' Yeah, that's what I look for.