Human-nature will not change.
Even the presence of my kids cannot, during those writing hours, disturb me. Unless there's a bone sticking out of their arm, I'm not interested.
But I've married a deeply sensible person who is extremely good at talking me down from my various ledges, and who takes care of me in a billion ways.
I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.
Sometimes I read a biography of some tempestuous artist and find myself longing for fireworks! booze! bloody fights!; I do think that life must be so much more thrilling when you're actively miserable.
My son is actually named after Beck, the musician. We heard Beck on the radio and thought that was a good nickname for a child. We named our son Beckett so we could call him Beck - we reverse engineered. And then after he was born and I saw the name on the birth certificate I realized Beckett was a really pretentious name, way too literary. Luckily he's grown into it. We nearly named my second son Dashiell. Can you imagine? Beckett and Dashiell. It would have been a disaster of pretentiousness.
The novella is at once the most elegant and demanding form: a writer must balance the looseness of a novel with the concision of a short story, a feat that only the bravest and most talented of us can manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval proves, yet again, that she is exactly the right writer for the job. A wild American picaresque, Brazil snaps along briskly, yet feels full-fleshed, and brims with a sly wit and grace.
I have been called an eco-designer simply because I use wood. But I am not an eco-designer, nor does the use of wood make me one. I am a designer who cares about the effect of what I do, and about making good things for people to keep and cherish - that, surely, is simply the basic condition for 'good design'?
A part of being an actor is I people watch. I like to observe their behaviour, watch their reactions on the street and see how they talk to each other, and that's impossible when they are looking back at you. I used to enjoy taking the train and watching people in their own minds, struggling with themselves.
Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise.
I think capital punishment's day is done in this country. I don't think it's fairly applied.