I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

I feel that these stories are being written to articulate certain confusions and disappointments, and I do mean to shake up the reader, and I do hope they're on target.

I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

Much of what happens in Love Always is really from overheard conversations in the Russian Tea Room. It's an improvisation of the way certain Hollywood agents think and talk to each other.

I think I write about things that are mysterious to me.

I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the culture when people went out dancing in a different way than they do now.

While I would agree that I write about serious subjects, and that they're not necessarily the most pleasant subjects or even the most pleasant people, as a writer I just think about the humorous aspects of these things - that's what keeps me going when I'm writing a story.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

Well, a few years ago I think I could have given you a more enthusiastic answer about that but in the last few years, for the first time in my life, I really haven't listened to much music. I used to work with music on and now I don't.

Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.

I don't even correct people when they mispronounce my name now.

I must say also that it's never worked to my disadvantage that I have long, blond hair.

You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.

Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways.

I think that I'm serious, but I don't think that I'm inordinately bleak.

If you could have a book called My Favorite Six Stories, I don't think I'd have trouble doing that.

When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days.

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.

When I lived in New York, not only did I have safety locks on the door but I had the music going, keeping the city at a distance, trying to find creative time and peace and so forth.

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect.

It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that.

I've been in this business for a long time, and I no longer think that anything that I do by way of clarification is ever going to eradicate the mistakes.

It's gratifying that it does; I love to give readings.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

Falling in Place was meant to be very much rooted in a place and time, and music was a part of that.

It's interesting, though, that in daily life, I think of myself as being relatively unobservant.

I've spent my life supporting myself.

Also minimalism is a term that all of us who share so little in common and who are lumped together as minimalists are not terribly happy with.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

The word 'romance,' according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime.

The director is a bit analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. It's a collaborative adventure.

Music should always be an adventure.

I always say that my favorite game was Original Adventure, published by both Microsoft and Apple Computer back in 1980.

Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.

We all want something else other than what we have and don't realize what you got works. It works. It does work. You gotta work. Marriage is work. Marriage is a career. It's not an adventure.

This land may be profitable to those that will adventure it.

Liberalism regards life as an adventure in which we must take risks in new situation, in which there is no guarantee that the new will always be the good or the true, in which progress is a precarious achievement rather than inevitability.

But the love of adventure was in father's blood.

It was an amazing adventure, it was my dream to be in an American musical... I really hope you are going to love what you are going to see.

There is no certainty; there is only adventure.

Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

Sometimes you like the personal adventure implicit in the making of a film, and sometimes you like your part in a film, and sometimes you like the final result.

For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories... But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry.

I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life.

Each child is an adventure into a better life - an opportunity to change the old pattern and make it new.

The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they're always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.

We have built our State on the freedom of personal adventure.

In racing, we have a better chance of it happening quicker because we have attracted good people to come to work for us. It's the beginning of a great adventure, and we're looking forward to it.