I've always stayed on the periphery of things. When I used to go to the punk clubs and things like that, I was never up front. I always wanted to be in the back, or on the side, because I wanted to get the whole view, rather than be staring up at someone's nostrils.

Being raised Catholic in a pressure-cooker household besieged by alcohol and bill collectors enforced and heightened a sense of sentry duty in me, the oldest of five children and the one most responsible for keeping everything from capsizing. Wild indulgence was for other people, the non-worriers.

Particularly fine is the top-heavy comedienne, Loni Anderson, as the receptionist whose movements turn men to stone...she keeps her head while all the men around her are losing theirs.

It's the contemporary woman that movies don't know what to do with, other than bathe her in a bridal glow in romantic comedies where both the romance and the comedy are artificial sweeteners.

One of the mistakes they often make is the designers over-accessorize or over-elaborate. So you realize: this would work if they removed X and Y. And actually, that's the sort of thing that translates into writing, because a lot of the time you realize, I feel I need to add something here but actually what I need to do is subtract. And then there's always the psychodrama and the tears and the rage and the feuds.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

It's one thing to fight for what you believe in, another thing to fight for what others believe in.