Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification.

I must have got my detailed, obsessive streak from my father, who was an English teacher, because my mother wasn't like me at all.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

The comic novels I did when I was in my 20s had a harder edge - less sympathy for people. Or a sympathy that was harder to detect: Characters' foibles and obsessive bents were unrelenting, like caricatures.

I wouldn't call myself successful, just obsessively exhausted. The music makes me smile, the movies make me feel humbled, and the comedy saves my life every day.

You will soon find that I am a bit obsessive about my work. And that is a little sad, one often feels strangely restricted, not finding time to simmer, although one actually has many interests.

I don't want to believe it - that parenting itself makes art hard, that you must always sacrifice one for the other, that there is something inherently selfish and greedy and darkly obsessive in the desire to care as much about the thing you are writing or making as you do about the other humans in your life. What parent would want to believe this?

I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o'clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper-towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable, like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage.

Love is an obsessive delusion that is cured by marriage.

About 10 years ago, in an effort to gain a better grasp on McCone's world, I took up the hobby of building fully electrified scale models: first of the legal cooperative where she started out, and then of her own brown-shingled cottage, a pursuit that the more tactful of my friends label unusual, and that the more blunt refer to as obsessive.

I'm as obsessive with health as I was with destruction.

It wasn't until I hit 20 that I became an obsessive reader, I think, which feels a little funny considering I was a bookseller for five years and have been reviewing YA novels for four years.

My mom has a couple great tricks, but my father is consistently a good cook. He's extremely avid about health and fitness and a bit obsessive. He always talks about garden-fresh food.

I try to keep at a non-obsessive level of fitness. It's not about looking great, it's about just feeling good. So I do a lot of yoga. Bikram just blows my mind. It's mental as well as physical; if I don't train, I get very depressed.

I think I am becoming obsessive-compulsive. David Beckham apparently turns all the Diet Coke cans in his fridge to face the same way every morning, and I nerdily sharpen all the pencils in my pot before sitting down to work.

I pay attention to my diet to be a healthier gymnast, but I'm not obsessive over it.

Facebook and pictures on the Internet have created such a different way of dating. It's not necessarily good because an obsessive quality can develop in people.

I'm an anorak. I've always been an obsessive collector of things. Richard Briers collects stamps. I collect cars and guns, which are much more expensive, and much more difficult to store.

I fell in love with Erica Kane the summer before my freshman year of high school. Like all red-blooded teen American boys, I'd come home from water polo practice and eat a box of Entenmann's Pop'Ems donut holes in front of the TV while obsessively fawning over 'All My Children' and Erica, her clothes, and her narcissistic attitude.

I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.

I did not want to put myself on the line, as an Australian playing Britain's greatest comic actor. The fans of Sellers are obsessive, possessive - and aggressive. I did not want to risk their anger - or my own reputation.

Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?

Everything worth knowing about the 1980s I learned from obsessively reading Bloom County collections when I was nine and Derek Jarman's diaries when I was twenty.

For the record, I would like to point out that it is NOT being obsessive to memorize a boy's schedule so that you can accidentally bump into him. It is called being efficient.