It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.
I was born in a blizzard, a special out-of-season blizzard, the worst blizzard Oslo ever suffered. Family, home, circumstances, the country I lived in and the weather I was born in all conspired to make a skater of me.
For some reason I only crave fruit when I'm in a tropical place - if it's really hot in the summer or if I go to a tropical island for work. But otherwise I really don't crave it.
I was so sure I wanted to be a novelist. I would spend hours and hours every day writing. Little stories about nothing in particular. I recall one about someone with an illness. But my dedication wasn't really healthy, and it reached the point where I wasn't sleeping. My mum would tell me, 'You need to go outside to get some fresh air.'
There's no way to eloquently put this. I just can't go to the mall. It bothers me that I can't be outside very often. And also to not ever be just 'some girl' again. Just being some chick at some place, that's gone.
In the earlier days I did most of the song writing by myself, and I got to a place in my life where I felt it was necessary to go outside my box and get some outside inspiration.
Film is such an extraordinary rich medium which can handle so many different modes of operation, combining together in the same place all these extraordinary disciplines which may be executed in their own right - music, writing, picture making of all kinds, and I often feel that some filmmakers make films with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.
The hooves of the horse! Oh! witching and sweet is the music earth steals from the iron-shod feet; no whisper of love, no trilling of bird, can stir me as hooves on the horse have stirred.
A big blizzard proves there's no global warming in the same way being out of milk proves there's no such thing as cows.
The first time I flew, it was being alive. Nothing was pressing under me. I was living in the fullness of air; air all around me, no holding place to break the air spaces. It's worth everything to be alone in the air, alive.
The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.
But it was only hot outside, and generally I only walked outside between one air-conditioned place to another.
The secret to writing is writing. Lots of people I know talk about writing. They will tell me about the book they are going to write, or are thinking about writing, or may write some day in the future. And I know they will never do it. If someone is serious about writing, then they will sit down every day and put some words down on paper.
I'd sleep outside naked in the blizzard,for you.
I've met several times with the Activision guys and we've talked at length about Blizzard's philosophy on game development and game publishing and all the things that are important to us at Blizzard. We found that we shared a lot of the same values.
TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air.
What I think is important about essayists, about the essay as opposed to a lot of personal writing is that the material has to be presented in a processed way. I'm just not interested in writing, "Hey, this is what happened to me today." You get to a place that has very little to do with your personal experience and talks about some larger idea or something in the culture. I don't think you can get to that unless you have had a lot of time to gestate and maybe if I was taking a lot of notes while stuff was going on, I wouldn't be able to get to that place as easily.