We're all going to die, it's just a matter of when.

The main thing to me is content, ... Essentially, I'm dealing with things I can't necessarily talk to people about--issues that are volatile, unpopular--coupled with my own problems, my own feelings of inadequacy. If something is bothering me on a personal level, I'll usually put it into my art--sickness, war, abortion--or genetic manipulation, which concerns me greatly. We're on the verge of being able to modify ourselves physically any way we want or even design people from scratch. The government might potentially get involved; look at the eugenics movement in the U.S. back in the '20s or the Nazis. I do see a potential resurgence of those concepts. But I think it'll mostly be consumer-driven.

We don't address this properly. We tend to think of hope as expectation, and when that expectation is 'I will live as long as I can no matter what' in the face of a terminal illness, then that's actually an unrealistic expectation.

Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.

My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon - this was before television, and we didn't even have a radio - I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered I was reading and enjoying what I read.

She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.