Juliana Hatfield

It may seem strange, but the most grateful I've ever felt was when I was held up at gunpoint. After I handed over my wallet and the mugger ran off into the woods, I thought, 'Thank you for not shooting me.' I was overwhelmingly glad to be alive and unharmed.

Self-indulgence is something to watch, but anything that helps you understand situations that are difficult to understand is good. If you're having some sort of emotional trauma, you need to find a person to talk to about it who says, 'This is quite normal; it's fine.'

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.