I think that in any language when you have a real relationship, and there is love and respect between people, infidelity is always something difficult to accept – whether you are Chinese, British, French. I think that is a universal concept… or problem.
Certainly a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.
Selfishness, narcissism, being uncomfortable in your own skin, not feeling connected to the world around you, feeling dislocated from family and youth, having a strange relationship with your childhood – all those things feel really true to me.
In real life, there are some times where a partner has cheated on somebody, and that person never found out about it. I have to imagine that that’s happened before. It’s a thing we don’t really want to think about, because it’s maybe the most painful thing to think about in a relationship – ‘What if I’ve been cheated on and never knew?’
I think it is really important to indulge on the holidays, I think that we all deserve that; I think that the more you worry, the more it’s a problem. I think everyone’s relationship with food is all about giving your body what it wants and what it needs. I think indulging is good and working out, too, for sure!
I wouldn’t mind working in restaurants again because you build up a relationship with the customers. I’m really inspired by the mundane – it’s often the most ordinary-looking people who have the best stories – and you can watch diners and study their idiosyncrasies without them being aware of it.
If we could establish a deep abiding relationship with nature, we would never kill an animal for our appetite; we would never harm, vivisect, a monkey, a dog, a guinea pig for our benefit. We would find other ways to heal our wounds, heal our bodies.
I’ve developed a theory that there’s an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you’ve got lots of imagination then you don’t really need much money, and if you’ve got lots of money then you won’t bother with much imagination.
The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being’s functions and activities. A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.
‘Boo & Hiss’ has been a passion project of mine for a couple of years. I was intrigued with the idea of what would happen in a classic cartoon predator/prey relationship if the predator – in this case, a cat – got to finally do in his adversary only to have the mouse return as a ghost and bedevil the cat.
The first time you go on holiday is the test of a relationship, when you really find out if you’re compatible or not. You find out what’s annoying about that person, and whether or not you’re willing to put up with that because you love them and you don’t want to be alone.
The Clash had a unique, special relationship with Scotland. Perhaps it was something to do with the energy, anger and beauty in their music. In Scotland at that time, there was a lot of to be angry about. And a great need of some energy and beauty.
Whenever you’re dealing with something that’s difficult to describe, that you can’t get across to someone in a sound bite, it sounds like the normal default is to pick what’s easiest, and in the case of fiction written by women, fiction involving women, fiction involving any sort of relationship, the word that comes to mind is ‘romance.’
Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don’t any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.
I include myself in the posters because I feel like it forms a more intimate relationship between the artist and the person passing by. And it’s important to include some vulnerability and use fears and rejections and various aspects from my own life so people look at my work as more than greeting card fodder.
My husband and I have, in some ways, a non-traditional relationship – especially when it comes to domestic duties. He does most of the cooking, dishes, and laundry, while I do most of the yard work. I love to mow the lawn! And I take great satisfaction in planting and pruning.
I always talk to all the crew. I always make it pleasant. I always nurture a relationship that makes people feel like they’re important, like they’re a part of the collaboration. I feel that way about the young actors on set. I don’t talk to them like I’m the mentor; I talk to them like they’re my peers. And I learned that from Meryl Streep.
My father was on the Judiciary Committee all 18 years. He had a good personal relationship with Jim Eastland. They probably didn’t agree on practically anything, or very little, from a public policy standpoint. But they were willing to work through that to see what they could get done just because they knew each other and liked each other.
Britain is still seen as a beacon for decency, for democracy, for vigorous judges upholding the rule of law and, dare I say it, a free press. I respect the press in theory, but when you see some of the things it writes about you, it’s not exactly a happy relationship.
My husband is the romantic one in our relationship. He’s always doing sweet things for me. Each year, we recreate our first date – it was a blind date, and we met at the zoo, followed by a trip to the museum. I’d have to say that’s my favorite romantic date.
Being a woman, we talk about equal pay all the time. We’re not talking about if you’re black or if you are Latina. I would like to get back to that and improving the relationship between the police community and the community of color. I don’t know exactly all the right things to say, but I want to engage in that conversation.
That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It’s the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical – in my case, anyway – but also quite detached.
That’s something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you’ve never met.
People are doing too much e-mail. The basic thing is eyeball-to-eyeball. Business relationships are made to be personal. The more people get away from it, the more they are going to lose that personal relationship. That’s what I learned – to develop personal relationships with people.
As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do.
