Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.

The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power.

The more potent, unasked question is how society at large reacts to eager, voluntary violence by females, and to the growing evidence that women can be just as aggressive as men.

This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on.

Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.

Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.

We're also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.

What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.

But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.

I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.

But I went to high school in a Portland suburb and went to college here.

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

The intense campaigns against domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment, and inequity in the schools all too often depend on an image of women as weak and victimized.

Every doorway, every intersection has a story.

And while national military forces have historically resisted the full participation of women soldiers, female talent has found plenty of scope in revolutionary and terrorist groups around the planet.

Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless.

I come from a family of great readers and storytellers.

Training of female athletes is so new that the limits of female possibility are still unknown.

I think that it's really important to go away and come back.

I know if I were in your generation I would be really tired of seeing Sophia Loren as a sex object.

But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.

A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another.

A film adaptation is, I hope, the director's version. A new creation.

A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.

Anthropologists believe women were among the skilled boxers of the ancient, sport-loving Minoan culture that flourished on Crete until 1100 B.C. The boxing booths at English fairs featured women in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Behind every locked door on Skid Road are a thousand stories.

Boxing gyms are more than training facilities. They are sanctuaries in bad neighborhoods for troubled kids and shrines to the traditions of the sport. The gym is home. For many, it's the safest place they know.

Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.

Donald Westlake's lean prose and deadpan delivery are engaging, as always.

Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.

Fiction, even when it's grim and hard, is fun.

Film is a different art form with its own demands and its own riches.

I don't like to see anyone suffer, and there's a very, very fine line between being healthy and working and totally down and out.

I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

I hate to tell you this, but I did not know what the National Book Award was when I got the call.

I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.

I think it is the natural and innate function of certain organisms to secrete beauty in permanent forms we call artworks, to respond to beauty by answering its discovery with a new beauty.

I thought if I just told the truth, the human truth, it'd be the truth for everyone.

I thought that was actually kind of boring, that search for perfection.

I was reading a lot of European history, and I thought Attila the Hun had gotten a bad rap.

I'm just a regular Joe.

I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.

I'm slow by everybody's standards. But not by mine.