Basically, I was a kid growing up with a single mother in Brooklyn.

I do a lot of research on what people have done in the past.

I remember finding a Houdini book at the library and seeing an image of him chained on the side of a building. He looked so intense and scary, and I couldn't get that image out of my head. That started building up my love of magic.

I've always liked artists like Chris Burden, who would take performances, put them in galleries, and then do things that were on the edge.

My story, I feel like it's amazing, because it shows people no matter where you come from, no matter what your lifestyle is, your dreams could still come true if you believe in yourself and push hard to do what you want to do.

I always had a lot of fun in America, with much more freedom than if I had tried to cook in France. I wouldn't have the same motivation or inspiration, and I wouldn't have cooked for the same kind of people in France, so it wouldn't have given me this edge I had in America.

The Christian churches were offered two things: the spirit of Jesus and the idiotic morality of Paul, and they rejected the higher inspiration... Following Paul, we have turned the goodness of love into a fiend and degraded the crowning impulse of our being into a capital sin.

I've never really found inspiration for story ideas in the news, but I'd say it certainly affects our lives in so many ways. I would say that certainly the stories of the day appear in the work - I just have never gone so far as to say, well, this particular event could influence a plot of an entire book.