When I'm at home in Virginia I become more hermit-like. I like my own home.

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia and we didn't have any money we just survived on happiness on being a happy family.

The founders of a new colony whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery and another portion as the site of a prison.

I love Charlie Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin and it's the funniest most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.

I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy.

Men of Virginia countrymen of Washington of Patrick Henry of Jefferson and of Madison will ye be true to your constitutional faith?

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim an architect born and raised in Virginia and his name is Mohammad Khan.

In Seattle I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond Virginia might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.

The first trip I remember taking was on the train from Virginia up to New York City watching the summertime countryside rolling past the window. They used white linen tablecloths in the dining car in those days and real silver. I love trains to this day. Maybe that was the beginning of my fixation with leisurely modes of travel.