To solve the Cube, you need special skills and understanding. For example, pattern recognition is very important to solve the Cube.

If you are not able to do something, that is true for the present, not for the future. All the time there's a chance to go a step further. Not to be frustrated.

My main profession is architect.

The Cube was a wonder - a wonder for itself and a wonder for myself. To me, it was much more strange than to anybody else.

In August of 1989, we arrived in Los Angeles where we had family. With their help, along with that of Jewish resettlement organizations like HIAS, my parents were set up with jobs.

Despite the volatile mixture of family, politics and past misdeeds darkening the present, 'Hardball' doesn't have the sharp tang of the early novels or the expansive reach of more recent series installments.

I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

I wanted to be an actor ever since I got on stage for the first time, aged 13. Before that, I thought I might follow in the medical footsteps of my parents: my father was a doctor, my mother a pharmacist.