Laws to protect 'public health' are potentially infinite, especially once they no longer have to be supported by any research whatsoever.

The dumbest childhood vow I ever made was to finish every book I started.

The sign that I don't like the book I'm reading is finding myself watching reruns of 'Come Dine With Me.'

Hungry for both fantasy and inspiration, readers crave protagonists who, after overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, triumph at the end of the day.

Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling.

Weight having become politicised, anyone with a profile in the media who either subscribes to or departs from the template of tininess implicitly represents a constituency, whether they want to or not.

Ironically, heavier comedians, actors, and the characters they play are actually more sympathetic, and easier for audiences to identify with, than the svelte.

A smaller waist is not the solution to all your problems.

Most women work not from yearning for fulfilment but yearning to pay the mortgage.

I read 'The Bell Jar' as an adolescent and, like most teenagers, had no problem identifying with a young woman who had everything going for her - looks, talent, opportunity, with her 'whole life ahead of her,' yadda, yadda, yadda - yet was spiraling into misery.

In economics, 'competitiveness' does not describe Barack Obama's insistence on not only being president of the U.S. but also beating his staff at bowling.

Few Amazon punters will explore a book with the depth of an 800-word review.

Certainly, critics are not all created equal.

I might defend the reviewing trade, but a handful of haughty hired hands no longer having the last word on books is not a bad thing.

Some of the best scenes in drama take almost no time - helping to illustrate that life-changing events in real life often occur in a split second, after which nothing is ever the same.

During the protracted tooth-and-nail tussle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, I was one of those fierce partisans desperate for the first black candidate with a serious shot at the White House to win the nomination.

Ultimately, Hillary and Obama are on the same side.

Though a fine writer, Scott Spencer will forever be associated with a cheesy, sentimental film starring the vapid box-office draw Brooke Shields.

I'm sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about 'Kevin,' and of course, the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches, I never take a single reader for granted and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh.

As any traveller knows, heading elsewhere is one thing, getting back quite another.

February is for curmudgeons, whinge-bags, and misanthropes. You can't begrudge us one month of the year or blame us for being even crabbier, it's so short. There is nothing good about it, which is why it's so great.

Formal declarations of mistrust, pre-nups are emotionally unfortunate. They overtly plan for failure, and thus involve a jarring cognitive dissonance.

However unattractive, pre-nups are at least a way round a law that dictates simply because you love someone and share their bed, that person has a claim on everything you own.

By stereotyping my work's audience as self-involved and prissy, women-only packaging also insults my readers, who could all testify that trussing up my novels as sweet, girly, and soft is like stuffing a Rottweiler in a dress.

Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty. More concerned with what is put than how it is put, she also understood that you only say anything at all when you say it well.

I was born after the heavy spade work of female emancipation was done.

Dieting is odious and can require years of determination and sacrifice. I entirely understand the impulse to say, 'Screw it,' and have another piece of cake.

I have buckets of sympathy for the obese, often subject to cruelty, ridicule, denunciation, and contempt.

There's a kind of beauty to a skyscraper.

You see in moments of duress not only the darkest parts of human nature but also the brightest, the most noble.

I see my work behind the camera as the actualization of a poem. I like to linger on images, conveying things through stillness.

Traditional westerns typify some of the hardships men face: you have to be rugged, silent, stoic. It's a man against nature, against the world.

When I play 'Grand Theft Auto,' I'm such a nerdy little law abider because I've always had this active imagination in which I sympathize and empathize with things.

I think it's a very powerful notion, the notion that our personal views, although closely held, are not necessarily right. That part of what is noble is making sure there are checks and balances and a plurality of opinions.

Being a lawyer, it's like holding a key card to a parallel dimension of rule sets in the world, and it's lovely to make sure that key continues to work and to continue to brush up on the law every so often.

I need to be believe that dragons are real. I want them be a real thing.

I log on and there are so many cookies embedded in my computer - it's like they know what I need before I do.

America is built on the labors of the oppressed.

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.

I've been looking for a superhero I could tune into and relate to for years, and when nobody stepped in to take the place of 'Buffy' in my poor soul, I thought, 'Maybe I can create somebody!' That's how 'Headache' came to be.

I would say that, between us, I tend to be a little bit more philosophically optimistic. Jonah, I think he sees things as more finite.

I try not to look at press. However, I have a mother, who will gladly tell me what's going on out there.

I grew up in Asia, and I remember as a little kid being in Taiwan watching films there and being so awed by these new worlds of entertainment.

For me, I've always been fascinated by tales of the Chinese railroad and the workers and the conditions of the workers who built the railroad.

If you play a game like 'Grand Theft Auto' you don't go home afterwards and cry because you ran over a couple characters, because you do not give them personhood.

I was always interested in writing from an early age, but it seemed so far away and inconceivable, like wanting to be an astronaut or a pop star.

I love the idea of the literary salons in France where artists and writers would all come and talk and drink absinthe.

When I first began writing, it was not in screenwriting but in poetry. That form was so evocative, all about the image and the emotion captured in a Polaroid-like smattering of words.

The appealing thing to me about Wonder Woman is the question of, who is this woman in tights and leotard walking around? What's her story and how does it resonate with women today?

The ways in which mankind tends to invent technology is because we have this drive to create and to innovate, and we don't necessarily pump the brakes when we're doing it.