I think listening to music from your youth is as powerful as a scent passed beneath your nose.

I really love Scrabble. I played it with my mother growing up. We took it everywhere with us. We didn't know then about the two letter words. Who knew that AA, or more controversially, ZA, or QI were words? We were a games family generally.

I've always been drawn to writing for young readers. The books that I read growing up remain in my mind very strongly.

Some people are uncomfortable saying what they feel.

If you look to any of our art, whether it's music, television, movies, art, anything - we seem to be really looking for love, and often in all the wrong places.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents' boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing 'Amazing Stories,' with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that.

In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.