I met my grandfather just before he died and it was the first time that I had seen Dad with a relative of his. It was interesting to see my own father as a son and the body language and alteration in attitude that comes with that and it sort of changed our relationship for the better.

If somebody says no to you or if you get cut Michael Jordan was cut his first year but he came back and he was the best ever. That is what you have to have. The attitude that I'm going to show everybody I'm going to work hard to get better and better.

My first love is art and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

In the first book of my Discworld series published more than 26 years ago I introduced Death as a character there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage to love my first language Spanish to learn about Mexican history music folk art food and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.

If the Frieze Art Fair catches on I imagine at least two great things happening. First we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn't too annoying to go to. More importantly Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures being shown for the first time were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

At the University of Maryland my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design stage design or television design.