One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one of the nuns discovered this phenomenon and I was actually sent around from classroom to classroom to do the whole thing.

I'm an exhibitionist, I was an exhibitionist as a kid.

If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience.

By the mid-70s, I wanted to get out of the business. I was tired anyway.

Nearly every notable event in 'Wake' has a date or a time stamp.

I got really good input up until the age of 11, which is perfect. That's when adolescence starts, when I would have really wanted to rebel. Up until that point, though, it didn't feel like doctrine, and it gave me a great moral structure.

By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.

I was a little geeky kid anyway. If I wasn't shooting little stop-animation films, then I was playing computer games or Dungeons & Dragons.