I was always interested in acting and writing, and I honestly thought I'd make my name as a scriptwriter one day. But somehow, I ended up in London in the early '70s, and that's where I had my David Bowie adventure.

Looking back, I can see that my life with David was molded by forces beyond my control and even my understanding. Still, I don't regret trying.

I've always been a Marvel fan. As a kid, I would pick up a two-foot stack of comics and read them in the back of my dad's car on long journeys across the States. That's how I used to make friends - I'd meet up with other kids, and we'd swap comics.

Being a grandparent doesn't interest me whatsoever. Babies are all right if they're your own, but I'm not interested in other people's. It's something you tolerate because they are yours.

At 11 years old, in 1968, my job was to deliver food on foot, so I spent my day walking around the city. I had an active imagination, jacked up by movies. I passed the time making up stories and serializing them.

But who can paint like Nature? Can imagination boast, amid its gay creation, hues like hers?

I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination.

A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space.