I write by stealing time. The hours in the day have never felt as if they belonged to me. The greatest number has belonged to my day job as a physician and professor of medicine – eight to 12 hours, and even more in the early days.
I always felt that sci-fi and fantasy were my thing. Bit of a geek, I’m afraid. But I like creating worlds, and I felt it was a genre that gave me more freedom. It just seemed like I belonged there.
I was too old to be a punk rocker. I was a mod, that’s really the only youth tribe I ever belonged to – and even then, not for very long.
I threw my 20th birthday party at Brown, and I didn’t even have to say to anyone not to put pictures on Facebook. Not a single picture went up. That was when I knew I’d found a solid group of friends, and I felt like I belonged.
A teenage foot that never tapped to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in the ’50s probably belonged to a hopeless grind.
I had so many people in my family with dementia that it felt like it belonged to me in a way. I feel like the same with teenage depression because I went through it. I feel like I’m allowed to write about it; it’s mine.
I have been an outsider in journalism and in the academy, because I never fully belonged to any of them.
In 2007, Donald Trump spent $20,000 that belonged to his charity – the Donald J. Trump Foundation – to buy a six-foot-tall portrait of himself during a fundraiser auction at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.
The psychiatric ward was a really creepy place and, hindsight being 20/20, the creepiest thing about it was that I truly belonged there.
Getting into acting was a challenge for me as I belonged to a political family.
I would sort out all the arguments and see which belonged to fear and which to creativeness. Other things being equal, I would make the decision which had the larger number of creative reasons on its side.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, most people in Britain lived in small village communities. They knew all their neighbours. They dressed alike, and almost all were white. The vast majority belonged to the same religion and spoke much the same language.
Acting was the only place that I ever felt like I belonged so went for it with everything I had.
When I was younger, I used to power dress – I’d wear black and grey and suits all the time, to make it feel like I belonged.
