I love the idea of the amateur - that's what popular culture is all about. But what the Internet's doing is professionalizing everyone's amateuristic impulses.

Television has to reflect back to you your own sense of security. It also has to mirror your sense of your own decency and your own limitations.

Everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities that come from being who you are. I think that is why the blogosphere is thriving. It allows people to develop a fantasy self.

Every 'Oprah Winfrey Show' has about it the aura of Oprah's own life, just as the rituals and sacraments of a religion are suffused with the life of the religion's founder. Above the testimony of Oprah's guests hovers what viewers know about Oprah's experience.

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.

If you lift the romantic element out of my plots, you still have fully formed mysteries. In the same fashion, if you pull the mystery out of a historical romance, you are left with a perfectly satisfying story.

When you're younger, you have ideas and visions of what you're going to be like when you're older and what love is going to be like and who you're gonna be married to and all of these different things.

You have to understand, the Blazers and their fans had a unique relationship. I'm not sure there has ever been a love affair between an NBA team and its fan base like we had... We had good players and good citizens.