The idea that I'm going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I'm going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.

I don't ask for an apology because it's only tomorrow's fish-and-chip paper.

I've got over so much. Mum wouldn't want anything to come into my life that would make me fragile again.

One thing that success has taught me is censorship.

I thought it would be my one and only exhibition, so I decided to call it My Major Retrospective.

Some people use just one condom, right? But we use tons.

With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.

My mum has never wanted me to have children. She thinks I would be destroying my life, even now.

The idea that I'm going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I'm going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.

When I got the phrase media whore thrown in my face last year, I thought, Oh my God, if you only knew.

They grew really quickly. One minute I didn't have any tits and the next I had the biggest tits in the world.

I have hardly any friends who aren't gay.

I'm not trying to find another thing that's wrong with me, but I'm such a nice person, and I have a couple of drinks and I'm really good fun and then I'm really not fun.

People try constantly to use me, and I hate it.

If I didn't want to work for a couple of years, I wouldn't have to-it's a great feeling, to know I'm doing it because I want to do it.

What is truth? Truth doesn't really exist. Who is going to judge whether my experience of an incident is more valid than yours? No one can be trusted to be the judge of that.

Maybe I don't believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing.

There's so much stuff said about me that's not true, so now if something is hurtful and wrong, I send an e-mail or letter immediately, saying, This is not true.

I'm out of here, I'm better than all of you.

It's happened time and time again, but the committee has always decided against it-the work was too conservative or didn't fit within the budget; there are millions of different reasons.

It pleases me that people can be interactive.

All the mistakes I've ever made in my life have been when I've been drunk. I haven't made hardly any mistakes sober, ever, ever.

I am fiercely independent and I probably wouldn't be if it wasn't for the way in which I was brought up.

I've been slagged off completely by the art world.

It wasn't so much destroying my dancing, it was destroying me.

They look at someone like me, and I just really get up their nose. I really wind them up.

People don't remember. Revenge is sweet.

There is nothing difficult about my work, and people get to hear it from me.

It's my memory, and what happened between that moment 10 or 15 years ago and now, there's a lot of gray area.

I never grew up.

I really love animals. My cat is my little soul mate. He's not just a cat, he's my friend.

I'd make a good friend, not mother. I'm too selfish. I think a lot of mothers are selfish and they end up having children, but I don't want to put some small tiny person through that.

I've got to start using my brain more - I've got to be more ethereal and more enlightened.

There's different kinds of love, and I'd never experienced that kind of totally platonic love. All the love I've experienced has always been a kind of deal, and now, as I get older, I realise that there's this other love out there.

When you're 20 or 30, looking ahead, you see these benchmarks for relationships, career, ambition, sexuality, and they went off into infinity. When you get to 50, you look at what's ahead of you, and there's an end. It goes into a nothingness, a void.

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.

I have always loved science fiction. One of my favorite shows is 'Star Trek.' I like the trips, where it drops my mind off, because they give you a premise and all of a sudden, you say, 'Oh!' and I'm fascinated by it.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.