I'm 58 years old. I got married for the first time - it's about time, right? Growing up as a gay woman, you just don't ever think about that, and then I thought, about 10 years ago, 'You know, I think within 10 years gay marriage will be legal.' And here we are, 10 years later, making it legal.
There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.
One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.
Music comes from a place we don't know.
Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.
I know in my own marriage I stayed in it to provide my son with what I thought was a stable background and to give him what I thought was the family life a child should have with two parents. But that isn't always the best way, and it took me taking my son to therapy after the divorce to really see it.
I know I didn't like that dress 'cause it didn't fit but I thought it was a great picture. We weren't the first band to do a picture in drag; The Rolling Stones were. If it was good enough for them then it had to be good enough for us.
I keep defying the odds, you know.
The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human.
I go to bars and restaurants, and I sit and I eavesdrop on people and I watch people in shopping centers and, you know, I read the newspapers and I talk to the Trenton cops, and I just get a lot of information that comes in that somehow turns into a book.
Once your kids are grown and you know that you're completely healthy, consider canceling your life insurance policy.
My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he's just started to understand that something's wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn't bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.
You know, it's possible for two humans to be in a relationship without there needing to be some public reason for that relationship.
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
I love 'Love Actually.' 'Love Actually,' there's, like, nine stories in that movie. Three of them are good. But watching that movie, I get emotional, I get choked up, my wife makes fun of me. I don't know if as you get older you get sappier and sentimental.
I don't know that Islam has ever been a subject of anything that I've written. I think Muslims have often been, but those are two very different things.
I think there is an immense charm and humanity about the Bollywood structure, probably in the way there was about Hollywood film in the '30s and '40s. Somehow they were less distracted about hardware, and more about production values and people, you know?
I seem to be some sort of lightning rod. I just really irritate people, you know? I really do.
I don't know if you can change things, but it's a drop in the ocean.
I know that young people sometimes, caught up in the moment, make some very foolish decisions.
When elected officials abandon our environment and ruin our natural resources, public health is endangered. I know the importance of providing a clean environment for our children; I have attended more than one funeral for a child who has died from an asthma attack.
Really, we don't know what to make of it except that we're delighted about it. We have all these fans thirty years later and they're still around and will probably be around for a long time to come.
Everybody assumes I know everything, so they send me these notes sometimes, and I don't know what they're talking about.
If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.
I know what it takes to go from the point where someone's looking at a newspaper article, and thinking, 'Oh, this would make a great TV series,' to the point where you're actually on a set and there's a camera aimed at someone.
You know, sometimes I feel like I walk around with a target on my back with the films I make.
I am a very strict mother, and as a mother, it's my responsibility to guide my kids and tell them to go how far and no further. There should be rules and guidelines for the kids, and they should know their limits.
I think there's a lot of things that occur within the African-American community, that we would prefer to stay within the African-American community - that we get a little nervous when you start having scenes or dialogue that we know is going to be viewed and heard on a national or global scale.
Our show was - it remained - you know, kids could watch it and laugh at it. And they wouldn't know - they wouldn't get the jokes. But they would laugh at it. So they tell me now they have grown up and they're watching it. Now they get the jokes. But we didn't say anything blatant.
I kind of remember a friend of mine saying, like, you guys should make a rap record. You know, because we were already making punk records. We were a punk band. And I kind of thought, that's crazy.
It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical.
I never really had a chance to know the players individually... I thought when they were on the floor, they worked hard. But I never really got to know them.
People see the 'Lil' Wayne' persona and think they know who he really is. My son's father is an intelligent, loving and lovable person who will always be a dear friend. That is all.
In the last recession, 99 percent of us have lost wealth, but did you know that the top 1 percent increased their wealth five times? It tells you they create recessions so they get wealthier.
You know, my parents had a restaurant. And I left home, actually, in 1949, when I was 13 years old, to go into apprenticeship. And actually when I left home, home was a restaurant - like I said, my mother was a chef. So I can't remember any time in my life, from age 5, 6, that I wasn't in a kitchen.
Man, that record came out and was real big in Memphis. They started playing it, and it got real big. Don't know why-the lyrics had no meaning.
