I don't want to be that guy mumbling into his drink at a bar.

The economy in the Valley will need to grow if students want to come back and work with their specialized degrees. We need to develop more to create more opportunities.

The thing about kids is that they express emotion. They don't hold back. If they want to cry, they cry, and if they are in a good mood, they're in a good mood.

Gee I don't know, I just want to get home.

The best roles you have to fight for. You have to really want to do it and you have to go after it.

What you want to do is, you want to get away from people being afraid to show their work, which is the first thing, because they don't want to be shot down.

There is so much media now with the Internet and people, and so easy and so cheap to start a newspaper or start a magazine, there's just millions of voices and people want to be heard.

I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

In Japan they prefer the realistic style. They like answers and conclusions, but my stories have none. I want to leave them wide open to every possibility. I think my readers understand that openness.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

I don't want to be a star. If you have to label me anything, I'm an actor - I guess. A journeyman actor. I think 'star' is what you call actors who can't act.

All I want to do when I have time off is to have a laugh with my school friends and go down the pub.

There are a lot of female artists my age around at the moment, but they're all American and blonde and blue-eyed and smiley. I'm totally the opposite of that. I want to show a bit more attitude and I have an opinion.

If you've only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.