We have a system in the hands of bureaucracy. Everything is difficult. Everything is complicated. And my idea is simply give simplicity to Italy.
Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person.
If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?'
It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves.
Anyway, these books I love, they’re all books by men—every last one of them. Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.
I think that one of the great things about spending - as in my case - twenty-something years with somebody is that at some point you do love the actual person. They're there little by little, the outline is really pretty clear.
Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying -- valiantly, fruitlessly -- to eradicate.
The current male-dominated model of success - which equates success with burnout, sleep deprivation, and driving yourself into the ground - isn't working for women, and it's not working for men, either.
I've had a lot of people online say they're going to kill me at my shows. A lot of people say they're going to punch me in the face - never happened. It's just people being sad because their life sucks.
I think it's interesting how people act on their beliefs. A lot of Christians, for instance, wear crosses around their necks. Nice sentiment, but do you think when Jesus comes back, he's really going to want to look at a cross?
Ideas get substance and value not by being discussed but by being lived.