I don't believe in organized religion - I dealt with them hand in hand, and a whole bunch of Catholic priests tried to molest me. Telling me I was gay and I should go home with them and stuff.
My mom had a huge video camera that I would always play with, and there is home video of me, like, with the camera letting her know, 'I want to do stuff like this when I grow up.'
With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.
I just want people to know you can get through stuff. I hope people can see that in what my life has been and where it is going.
I really, really love new work, and that's why, you know, I produced a concert series supporting new musicals and stuff like that. I hope to do more things like that.
When I go on holiday and people ask me what I do, I tell them I do some internet stuff and I've done a couple of books and I hope they just leave it at that.
I wish I could know everything ever, like that would be my wish - that's what I hope heaven is, that they tell you who shot JFK and all that stuff.
If we don't hope, if we don't stay positive - at least about love, or finding love - then the rest of life becomes really just painful to think about, because for the most part, you know, day-to-day stuff is monotonous.
Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It's the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children's books.
One question about a joke is, how well is the strangeness of the situation resolved? At 'The New Yorker', we retain a lot of incongruity, tapping the playful part of the mind - Monty Python-type stuff. We also try to use humor as a vehicle for commun...
History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.
We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.
History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budg...
I'm a huge sci-fi geek, and I also really get into all of the alien shows on the History Channel where you see air force pilots talking about UFOs - I love that stuff.
There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
And I have the support of the writers: I have a great relationship with the creative team, and they have a good hold of my character and my personality, and they come up with some great stuff, and I'm forever trying to change it up, keep it fresh.
All my kids were raised on computers: They were home-schooled on the Internet, so they're pretty good at that stuff. And I'm proud of them, but I don't really keep up with it.
I was once in a very, very bad car accident. So my drawing arm is full of pins and platinum stuff. Occasionally it hurts. But I found that after the arm was put back together I could draw better than before. I have no idea why.
It was all that stuff about taking your parents' car when you're 13, sneaking booze into rock shows and ditching school with your friends. I could relate to that as a former teenager, rather than as a present parent.
I remember when 'The Right Stuff' opened in Hollywood. I got dressed that morning and drove my car down to the theatre that it was playing on, thinking that there would be mobs of people outside. When I looked, there was nobody there.
