His imagination conceived and bore - worlds but nothing in these worlds became alive until he discovered its true and living name. The name was the breath of life and sooner or later he invariably found it.

I surrendered to a world of my imagination reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader especially history and Shakespeare.

I met Elton John at an Interview dinner and we just sort of became friends. He's got such a wicked sense of humor.

I was a product of a divorced family and I used humor as a weapon to combat sadness. I used comedy to make my mother laugh in light of the darkness that she faced and to me it became a very powerful tool at a very young age at six. I saw how therapeutic it could be.

But it also became the experience or was the experience of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books.

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

When I arrived at Columbia I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry French history French literature.

The United States is the only power in history that became great by giving and not by taking. I think the crisis was when the United States had more money than ideas. Money doesn't produce money. Ideas produce money.

I did a book in 1996 an overview of black history. In that process I became more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th century.