If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

My wife and I just prefer Seattle. It's a beautiful city. Great setting. You open your front door in the morning and the air smells like pine and the sea as opposed to bus exhaust.

My mom was an actress in the local Seattle theater doing experimental plays.

I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.

There's a food revolution going on throughout the country. And it doesn't matter if you're down south up north in Maine if you're out west in Portland or Seattle.

If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.

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.

I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.

I think there are four or five interesting pockets where a lot of cool technology companies are getting started. Chicago is one of them. New York is certainly another. Silicon Valley really dominates. And you're seeing some stuff out of Boston and Seattle and down South.

To some extent Seattle remains a frontier metropolis a place where people can experiment with their lives and change and grow and make things happen.