As a little girl growing up in a small farming town in Michigan, my idols were women like Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth.

I think as someone who collects beautiful things from the past, the thing that I miss the most about modernism and the things I lament about the past are everyday things that you would use were made more beautifully.

Every one of my products - my lingerie, my perfume, and everything that I do beauty-related with regard to building my burlesque shows - is just me.

I prefer the competitive atmosphere of a classroom setting, like yoga or Pilates. That keeps me going. Although performing on stage is great exercise!

My friend Josh Glenn compiles terrific lists of genre novels from the mid-20th century. His latest is a list of the ten best adventure novels of 1966. Josh also includes the cover art of early editions of the books, which are always much better than the art on newer editions. I want to read every book in this list!

People forget I go to work. They forget that the Coleridge house was bought and paid for by the daughter of a travel agent and a barmaid from what the actor Richard Burton once described as the nightmarish 'featureless suburb' of Croydon.

For me, the stamp that I impose on stuff comes from the fact that in the '80s, when I was starting to write movies, I looked back to the '70s. So the films I enjoyed as a kid were the thrillers that came out of the '70s. Back then, you didn't have action movies; you had adventure films or thrillers.

Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technology. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and maybe have Brain 2.0, i.e. our consciousness on a disk which will survive even after we die.