I have a two-story house and a bad memory, so I'm up and down those stairs all the time. That's my exercise.
Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in 'real' African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.
My biggest enemy for the longest time was my head. When I first became successful, it made me anxious because I was overthinking everything, and you hear so many 'fail' stories.
I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest.
I always have a story in my head that needs to be written, or at least I think I do. But I usually can't find the time to write it.
The mass media in the days of newspapers and television it's hard to be able to find a story that's about just what you're interested in at the time you're interested in it.
In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate.
Of course, every time someone does a story on plastic surgery, my name will be dragged up. I've made it safe for other people to have plastic surgery. It's no longer a bad word.
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.
Well, I had nightmares when I was doing the Klan story all the time. I had a recurring nightmare of basically being exposed as a Jew inside the Klan compound.
When you're writing a story in bits and pieces, month in and month out, there really isn't time or space for reflection, no room to learn what those scripts had to teach you.
It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.
People don't understand how much time and work it takes to make somebody laugh, and how hard it is to write a script, to put together the story, the characters. When everyone laughs simultaneously, there's no greater feeling.
To go around the world, to talk to almost anybody you want to talk to, to have enough time on the air, so that you could really tell a full story. What a voyage of discovery it was.
Before you can read, you know the difference between a story and reality. And, of course, by the time you're old enough to do any real damage with an Uzi, you've learned that difference.
What I learned most was how to tell a story in 15 seconds or 30 seconds or 60 seconds - to have some kind of goal of what to try to do and make it happen in that time.
Because many of us have been in game shows for some time, there's always someone around who can share a story of Johnny O or Jay Stewart that I never heard.
When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.
The same basic tools we've used for thousands of years to connect with people, to draw them in and to hold their attention will always work, even if we're telling our stories 140 characters at a time.
I think the challenge in hour television or half-hour television is that the more it's around, certainly on commercial television, the less time you have to tell stories these days, because the more commercials they're putting in.
