I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.
I don't shape trends, I'd say. I merely reflect them. I think the emphasis is on 'them.' I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.
I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.
I promise you that there are a lot of people involved in various kinds of retail activities who think they have a crucial role in the economy, and they're right.
I think it would help tremendously to have a senator that knows where jobs come from, that knows how to create them, that knows how to bring them back and, importantly, knows what it means to manage billions of dollars' worth of expenses and cut billions of dollars' worth of expenses.
I think it would be terrific if everybody was alike.
People always tell me the next stage of my career means moving to New York, but I never will. I don't care how that affects my career, and I think it's stupid that it would.
I have travelled and been pretty much a one man operation for most of my career, and I think it'll continue to be that way.
I grew up - for a while, the only show I could watch if I hadn't finished my homework was 'The Simpsons,' because I think my parents saw that there was some real-life lessons to take from that.
I actually get a metallic taste in my mouth when I think about electric music.
Salad can get a bad rap. People think of bland and watery iceberg lettuce, but in fact, salads are an art form, from the simplest rendition to a colorful kitchen-sink approach.
As I graduated high school, it didn't faze me anymore. Right now, I don't even care what people think of me. I'm happy with myself.
I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don't really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be, and I really like that, too, so it depends. I've always had more than one thing going.
Being a musician, people ask you a lot about what musicians inspire you, and there's plenty of musicians that I love and respect, but I think that I'm the most inspired by cinema.
I think Ang Lee is a very, very talented director. He used martial arts to talk about love and girl, you know... But Zhang Yimou tried to use martial arts film to talk about Chinese culture, Chinese people. What do they think, what do they want and what do they hope the world will become.
I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.
I think the reason I'm an actress is because I love playing kind of a more extreme people.
I think I know it all, relatively speaking.
Madonna is a pro. I don't like her and have no respect for her but- I don't think she should be called a musician or a dancer or whatever you know, but I do have, well I do have respect for her ability to completely manipulate the media and have them work for her.
I think I am seeing more clearly now than ever.
When I was hanging out with Joey Clements in Chicago, I made it a point not to try to emulate him. I wanted basically to create my own character. I didn't want him to think I was hanging out with him solely to use him as research.
I think it's more optimistic about human nature to acknowledge that people are the products of their time but then to see that they have moments of grace and dignity that everybody has.
My personal feeling, if I can interject a political note, is that I don't think it is right that basic health care is a privilege. It shouldn't be. It should be a right of all human beings. And certainly in the richest country in the world.
I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I've just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I've read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that.
I don't think that youth should be glorified.
I think people who have all kinds of debilitating mobility issues will benefit from robotic augmentation. That is, even before we get into organ replacement and organ printing and synthetic biology and so on and so forth.
Everybody right now, they look at the current technology, and they think, 'OK, that's what artificial neural nets are.' And they don't realize how arbitrary it is. We just made it up! And there's no reason why we shouldn't make up something else.
I'm in therapy, and I think everyone should be.
I always think that period between the ages of 18 and 24 is such a bizarre stage, and the two people at either end are always very different.
I think that we're all, as human beings, so limited. If we want to write about ourselves, that's fairly easy. And if we write about our friends or our families, we can do that. But if we want to project ourselves somewhere beyond our personal experience, we're going to fail unless we get that experience or we borrow it from others.
I think a CEO lives or dies in whether he's been able to hold on to elements of culture that are needed in the company.
I think if two people love each other, they should be able to get married. That's pretty much simple.
Feminism to me means fighting. It's a very nuanced, complex thing, but at the very core of it I'm a feminist because I don't think being a girl limits me in any way.
I have chronic - well, I like to call it late-stage Lyme disease and not chronic, because I like to think someday I'll be all the way cured. It took me a really long time to get diagnosed, and I was misdiagnosed for a long, long time. I was very ill during the end of Le Tigre, which was kind of why that ended, amongst other things.
I'm tortured because I care. I'm always upset about not doing things as good as I think I could have because I care.
You can't just take an aspirin and sit around and have 12 donuts and think, 'I took my aspirin so I'm not going to have a heart attack.' It's really important each person take personal responsibility for their health. You can't keep thinking that someone else is going to take care of it. You have to be part of the solution.
