It's called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn't realize what a rage I was in.
I'd seen her name on a call sheet for so many years and been called Jo so many times. If people said Jo in the street, I used to turn round because I was so used to being called Jo for five years on Spooks. You do get so used to being called something. Often, it was someone calling their young son... but sometimes it was people calling after me because they recognised me from the show. So, it was a big deal when it happened and it was quite an emotional end.
That's why 'Chandelier' was interesting to me... I wrote the song because there's so many party-girl anthems in pop. And I thought it'd be interesting to do a different take on that.
How many years has it taken people to realize that we are all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race? I mean how many years does it take people to see that? We're all in this rat race together!
During the holidays, I often see my sisters, who still, even after all these years, can't always seem to agree with me. They take silly, indefensible positions, such as denying that my parents loved me more because I was the better child.
I wrote my first textbook in 1970. It was called 'The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,' and over the years, many students told me that they enjoyed reading it because there were so many stories in there; often just a paragraph or a page of something that happened in a group session.
After I wrote my memoir, 'A Long Way Gone,' I was a bit exhausted. I didn't want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of 'Radiance of Tomorrow' pulling at me because of the first book.
The closer you get to death, the more alive you feel. Dylan Thomas wrote, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. My dad always taught me to live like that. Dad wrote a poem too. It goes, Dune buggies. Woohoo!
I wrote Her First American and I always say it took me eighteen years. It took me that long was because after about five years I stopped and wrote Lucinella. I got stuck; it was too hard to write. Lucinella felt like a lark. I wanted to write about the literary circle because it amused me, and I allowed myself to do what I wanted to do. It's just one of the things I'm allowed to do if I feel like it.
This is where our obsession with going fast and saving time leads. To road rage, air rage, shopping rage, relationship rage, office rage, vacation rage, gym rage. Thanks to speed, we live in the age of rage.
Women who just don't like each other because the other one is a woman and "women don't like each other" myth - that's not interesting to me at all. How do you compete in the market place, how you stay relevant after many years of being in the public eye - all of that. To me, that's interesting and that's real.
It's more in retrospect as I've thought about it over the years and look back at what I wrote, how I wrote things - like there's a song that Ralph Stanley later recorded with me that he had guested on my record what was called "Travelers Lantern" that I wrote as basically, you know, a hymn.
I was a Teletype operator in the army, so that's where I learned to type. One day, I went downstairs to see if I could still type - I hadn't done it for four or five years after the war. So I typed out a page and I showed it to my wife and she said, "Where did you get this?" I said I wrote it. "You wrote this?" It was something very funny. I went and wrote another page, another couple of pages, and by the time I was finished I had 13 little short stories, humorous short stories.
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
I'll always miss Mad Men, of course, but it is interesting to finally answer different questions after nine years. Not that that's a criticism to anyone, but just simply as a character for nine years, you're going to get a lot of the same questions for many, many, many years. This is sort of refreshing.
Many years ago, I was actually hired to write the sequel to 'Independence Day.' And I wrote a sequel. And they paid me a boatload of money to go write this thing. And after I wrote it, I read it and I gave them back the money and I said, 'Look, this is an okay movie I just wrote. But it's not worthy of the sequel to 'Independence Day.'
I tend to like strong female characters. It just interests me dramatically. A strong male character isn't interesting because it has been done and it's so cliched. A weak male character is interesting: somebody else hasn't done it a hundred times. A strong female character is still interesting to me because it hasn't been done all that much, finding the balance of femininity and strength. [From a 1986 Fangoria interview]