Common folk didn't have last names in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.

If they aren't real enough to surprise me, then they aren't real enough to go on the page.

I ride horseback - arthritic knees permitting - or listen to opera. Sometimes I cook. I used to do needlework, but it's hard on my hands now, so I only do it occasionally, but I like it. And, of course, I read.

I'm not a good collaborator in general.

I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript.

Isn't that an odd philosophy for a vampire?

Common folk didn't have last names in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Very few editors worry about heresy - their goals are much too commercial, thank goodness.

Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing.

I think it is probably more important to attend specialized conventions for a journeyman writer than any other, but it's useful at all stages of a career, if for nothing else, to find out how the industry is working at any given time.

When you're a mid-list writer, it pays to write fast.

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

I think my election is one of several indications that gay and lesbian folk are being brought more into the center of things. I'd like to think that my election signals my bringing of gay and lesbian folk into the center of the church.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

The models for me were more the folk-rock singers of the '60s and '70s.

I think they do a great job on Queer as Folk.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

Real folk music long ago went to Nashville and left no known survivors.

I have a deep rooted folk sensibility that I can't get away from completely.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

My father being in the movie business, I thought being an actor would be great. But when I started singing to people in coffeehouses, you know, singing folk music and then, later, singing songs that I started to write myself, I felt more than an affinity for it.

I really understand what that process is all about and how important it is, especially with young folk and creative folk that love looking for some platform that makes it easier for them to express themselves.

The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.

That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.

Why do we need to wait until somebody sells 10 million records to give people a show like that? What about us smaller, hungry folk? At least gimme a curtain!

But in my imagination this whole thing developed and I started mixing up old folk songs with the Beatles beat and taking them down to Greenwich Village and playing them for the people there.

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.

My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues.

He helped make Living Things even more crazy than I wanted it to be. He added old-fashioned piano and classical folk music - that weird otherworldly vibe - all these elements got onto the record.

Logically, when you talkin' about folk music and blues, you find out it's music of just plain people.

The vast majority of English folk cannot and will not consider a picture as a picture, apart from any story which it may be supposed to tell.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.

At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.

It was darn nigh impossible for women in rock in the '70s. There wasn't a mold if you were a woman and you were in the entertainment in the '70s. You were probably a disco diva or a folk singer, or simply ornamental. Radio would play only one woman per hour.

I was using them as teachers for technique but I was never trying to be a folk.

The big turning point, really, was the Beatles' influence on American folk music, and then Roger took it to the next step, and then along came the Lovin' Spoonful and everybody else.

The 1960s were big for folk music, and the Kingston Trio led the way. They were the ones who started it all. The music was fresh and alive. College kids loved it and their parents did, too.

The fact that The Bridge contains folk lore and other material suitable to the epic form need not therefore prove its failure as a long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.

Common folk didn't have last names in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Well, I don't think it ever did, but in the early '60s I got interested in folk music.

Princess Rose should indeed be a TV movie, assuming something doesn't go wrong. I don't know how good a movie it will be, because the way movie folk think is different from the way writers think, and I distrust what isn't done my way. This is what I call a healthy paranoia.

Everybody would grab a guitar and listen to somebody else and call themselves a folk singer. When they didn't know no more songs, they'd run out of them.

There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented. The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.

Folk-rock hasn't changed much over the decades since the Byrds started it.

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.