I'm trying to write a TV show. Ideally it would be just a reality-TV show, getting the guy who played Eddie Winslow and Kirk Cameron to live in a house. The Jehovah's Witnesses would come to the house a lot or something like that. I kind of like the ...
We've come a long way since 'Beowulf.' In the twentieth century, a strain in children's and YA literature offered the humorously conceived cozy dragon, a sometimes bumbling friend and guardian figure. Starting as early as Kenneth Grahame's 'The Reluc...
There's something magical about film, it's the ultimate for me, because it's kind of permanent - inasmuch as anything is. When I went to see Buster Keaton when I was about 14 and I came out of the cinema having really laughed at this film which had b...
Haagen-Dazs (a clever Scandi-sounding name invented by Americans in 1961) was bought for its Euro-sounding sophistication by the kind of Americans who first bought those Mercs and Beemers, while Ben & Jerry's (now owned by Unilever) brought a post-hi...
I think the Bush Administration had basically inherited a policy toward Iraq from the Reagan/Bush Administration that saw Iraq as a kind of fire wall against Iranian fundamentalism. And as it developed over the 1980s, it became a real political run-a...
When I go back to America, after a few days I am once again filled with this kind of angry alienation and disgust with this thing there that America has got - you have no idea how pervasive it is there. The public relations and propaganda put out by ...
I have the kind of personality that I always look ahead than look at what's happened. It does help a lot, especially when you've done badly or you've failed. It's instinctive of me that I look at what's next, I look ahead a lot, and start preparing f...
Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terribl...
When you see Robert Englund in a movie, you think he is the bad guy, but if I'm not the bad guy, and I'm supposed to just kind of fool the audience, it makes it a lot easier for whichever actor is the bad guy. So I find myself doing a lot of those, I...
I live in Indiana and teach at Purdue University, a wonderful school with some of the brightest students I have ever had the privilege of working with. My colleagues are powerful and intelligent and kind. The cost of living is low, the prairie is wid...
If all the Christians- I mean all of 'em- got outta the pews on Sundays and into the streets, we'd shut the city down. We'd shut down hunger. We'd shut down loneliness. We'd shut down the notion that there is any such of a thing as a person that don'...
I remember the revelation it was to me when I realized I'd rather be smart in the way Elvis Presley was than in the way, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein was. The thing was, you could imagine you could be smart like Wittgenstein by just thinking hard enough,...
I don't have the desire to just keep every record and put it out. That's not what I do. I make records for people; that's why I just continue to be consistent, where a lot of the other top writers, they kind of fell off because they started focusing ...
Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of od...
After all, it's all kinds of things that make up a life, right? The big, like falling in love and spending time with your family, and the little....like blow drying your hair, applying concealer, and cursing those magazine inserts. It all counts. It ...
Everybody, every tradesman that worked for Shafin or built my house got fully paid, well paid. Everybody got paid. I would like that to be said if I could because I haven't said it before, and it's important. People kind of think we left all these pl...
I am still in touch with my Secret Service agents, most of whom are retired now. They really get to be your friends. They watched me grow up, and most of them had little kids, so I was kind of giving them a warm-up of what was coming.
I have not been diagnosed with epilepsy. I did have an MRI of the brain, and they found no abnormalities in my brain. Now, there are people with epilepsy who have completely normal MRI's, too. I just think also, you know, epileptic seizures can be tr...
Long ago I used to mutter (as you probably do), "Very interesting," and cast a desperate glance around for the punch-bowl. This banal comment fools no one, least of all the artist, and you quickly find you have lost a friend and alienated a roomful o...
I was not athletically inclined. I was very quiet, introverted, non-confrontational. My three older brothers were athletes - basketball, football - but I was kind of a momma's boy. Then one day, my brother Roger encouraged me to go to the boxing gym ...
I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go bac...
