Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people it's also true on a national or cultural level.
This week the world gathers in Beijing for the 2008 Olympic games. This is the extraordinary moment China has been dreaming of for 100 years. People have been longing for this moment because it symbolises a turning point in China's relationship with the outside world.
Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it as far as I'm concerned.
You know women are as promiscuous as men and yet of course people are inhibited from having an affair or a relationship because the real-world consequences are a drag.
I'm not a good father and they're not children any more the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and because of what the law was they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers' morality in life and they were not my people any more.
If my career continues along its current arc people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor even when they don't mean to.
I have no problem with it. I don't look on homosexuality as an aberration. It's just they way they're born and how could any relationship between two people in a committed relationship be wrong regardless of gender?
In a relationship you want to treat people the way you want to be treated.
You know sex is actually not so original as the way people love or the stories behind each relationship which is what you remember. Sex is sex in the end.
Driving a cab is not really a nurturing type of relationship. You take people and they tip you they may not tip you you don't know their names they don't care about you you don't care about them.
A lot of married people certainly have wonderful relationships with their dogs but when you're single and your dog is the only other living thing in your house it's a really special relationship which I wanted CATHY to have.
I find it quite hard to sum up my relationship in a sound bite. I feel that it trivializes it for other people's pleasure. It's an adventure.
This thing with everyone knowing you it's weird because people have this one-sided relationship where they look at your picture and feel they know you more than someone they actually know. I don't really know myself that well.
You know when you get into that thing where people want to discuss the relationship? I'd rather discuss what was on telly avoid the issue discuss anything other than the relationship.
I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.
In order to satirize adequately I think you need to bring people down to Earth and be like 'Yeah these people drink coffee and have tummy troubles and they go to the bathroom like anybody else and they all have relationship problems if they even have relationships.'
A durable long-term U.S.-China strategic relationship is even more important now than in previous decades. The relationship will continue to grow and prosper to the mutual benefit of all peoples.
It's a very difficult thing losing a parent but I think there's an added complication for me because he was so well-loved and he had this very open charm that made people feel they had a personal relationship with him.
The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between men and women.
What we have now is doctors who are actually better technically at what they're doing in their specialty than 30 or 40 years ago but we lost the relationship when the doctor would look people in the eye and say 'I care about you. We can do this together.'
We should never denigrate any other culture but rather help people to understand the relationship between their own culture and the dominant culture. When you understand another culture or language it does not mean that you have to lose your own culture.
The establishment wonders why we can't get more of the black vote. It's because it's not doing the things necessary to establish a deeper relationship with the black community. Most black people don't think alike. Most black people just vote alike.
Look you've got a generation of people coming along who are going to form their own new relationship with the idea of supporting the causes that they care about or changing the world. And these people are not going to do it the way our parents do it.
I like to write with people I have a relationship with otherwise it's kind of scary and you hold back because you don't want to pour your guts out to someone you never met.