I want to try and portray characters that are in real life, that you see day-to-day. If I were to just stay in my little village in Wales, I would have gotten a very small taste of a very big plate.
For me growing up, Christmas time was always the most fantastic, exciting time of year, and you'd stay up until three in the morning. You'd hear the parents wrapping in the other room but you knew that also, maybe, they were in collusion with Santa Claus.
I put working out on my calendar as if it were a part of my job. It makes exercise as important a priority as brushing my teeth - something I need to do every day.
When you look at that period when Warhol and the Velvets and the Stones were doing things, it was this intersection of art and music. And then it went away.
I don't tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.
I have been intimately involved in the techniques of genetic modification as a scientist since GMOs were first conceived. In that time, hundreds of studies and tests have been done on GMO safety - and we've seen no scientific evidence that GMOs are inherently more dangerous than crops produced by traditional plant breeding.
I had been on several shows that were meant to be the big ones, that would go on forever, and they didn't.
Ronald Reagan had a kind of shallow movie-star charisma - a combination of makeup and the skill of a good actor - but it wasn't the real thing, and was something that he could turn off when the cameras weren't running.
The Divas Revolution didn't have the great start that I wanted it to have, but through time, it has got to where I want it to be, starting with the Triple Threat Match at Wrestle Mania. Our faces were in the middle of the stadium, which proves we are getting equal opportunities.
Auctions create greater price discovery and liquidity, resulting in a very meaningful final auction price. If you were building a securities exchange today, an auction would be a core feature.
Biggie and Big Pun were the best storytellers of the '90s. I would get wrapped up in the narrative of what they were talking about.
My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.
I was a little punk rocker and was pregnant with Sarah when I went to university. I had her in the Christmas holidays of the first term. It was 1979, and UCL was very proud of its reputation as a liberal university, so they were very helpful.
Maybe by making people feel uncomfortable, I tap into that uncanny quality that is a part of the scariest, weirdest things that you remember happening to you when you were a kid.
If you say you are the Safe Food Foundation, that means you're implying that your food is safer or that every other bit of food that we're eating is not safe. If they were a really honest foundation, they would call themselves the anti-GM foundation.
Every two weeks, I'd get a small pay-check and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.
I remember my school had some of the first Apple IIs in North Carolina. I remember, when I first started using them, we were using a cassette tape to store programs because we didn't have floppy disk drives.
I don't find it uncomfortable that I'm recognized and liked by so many people. If that were hard for me, I wouldn't be doing this work. Rather, I think I'd be more sad when a day come when people don't recognize me.
Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?
I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.
Being female was just one more way I felt different and weird. I was also a young 'un, and also my cartoons were not like typical 'New Yorker' cartoons.
I was really interested to see whether we could make predictions or forecasts by listening in on what people were saying on social media.
For the first time I go to La Scala, for each thing, for each rehearsal, my knees were shaking. But the audience was very fine with me.
We now think it hilarious that medieval streets were used as open sewers. Equally, our descendants will say: 'You won't believe this, but people were once allowed to hurl a couple of tons of dangerous metal around smashing into each other.'
Senator Clinton is very knowledgeable about national security and is probably going to be strong on defense. I have no doubts whatsoever that if she were president in January '09, she would not act irresponsibly and issue orders to conduct an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, regardless of the consequences, and squander the gains that have been made.
If I were king of the world there wouldn't be boat people, there would only be people coming in boats. I would mix us all up so that we were all exactly one shade of each other.
I have very fond memories of the '80s; they were very formative years for me. I certainly remember the Cold War. It was a closer doorstep for the Brits than the Americans, so it was a very real and palpable threat at the time.
My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor.
We had to forge an alliance of strength based not on colour but on commitment to the total abolition of apartheid and oppression; we would seek allies, of whatever colour, as long as they were totally agreed on our liberation aims.
If my cuisine were to be defined by just one taste, it would be that of subtle, aromatic, extra-virgin olive oil.
When I was a young kid, girls were taught that their role in life was to get married and have children. It was the 1950s. Those were the rules.
My experiences and training back at drama school were very enlightening. I always believe in improving, be it kathak or my acting skills, and would want to experiment more when it comes to work.
Back in 2008, when we were first preparing to launch Tor.com, I knew I wanted Jo Walton to be a regular writer for the site.
After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation, and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews.
In days gone by, short-statured people were not only labelled as ugly, stupid and freakish, they were often owned by aristocrats and treated, at best, as entertainment and, at worst, as pets.
A guy's who has all the money he needs and never faced any hard times, he won't have any character. But when you've had it tough and you've had it rough and you thought you were at the end of the rope and you work your way out of it, that's the way you build character.
