The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shook our nation to the core. Americans were deeply frightened sad and angry and they rallied around a President who at the time showed impressive certitude and calm.

The success my children have had has helped me immensely. I've showed them a certain respect for this career.

I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code - even though it was a great yawn - also showed people's interest in religion.

It was R.E.M. who showed other Eighties bands how to get away with ignoring the rules - they lived in some weird town nobody never heard of they didn't play power chords they probably couldn't even spell 'spandex.' All they had was songs.

Measurements of the specific ionization of both the positive and negative particles by counting the number of droplets per unit length along the tracks showed the great majority of both the positive and negative particles to possess unit electric charge.

And they said if we help with the crisis they would do a lot of positive acts. After we helped in those crises they showed negative acts and the Japanese and Turks were ashamed.

We asserted ourselves as a music community and showed legislators that music is positive. Especially if you've sold 300 million records worldwide and pay taxes.

I think Ray Charles did as much as anybody when he did his country music album. Ray Charles broke down borders and showed the similarities between country music and R&B.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane Chandler Jim Thompson and noir movies like Fuller Orson Welles Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that I thought golf writers got up every morning played a round of golf had lunch showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner.