I actually am terrified of horror movies. I'm very sensitive. But for me, I get so scared of horror movies that if I know something is coming I'll actually pause the movie and fast forward.

In some ways, every character we write, especially the protagonist, is some version of ourselves, as a writer/director, even if they aren't the same gender.

I grew up in a household that really encouraged reading and writing. My mother loves philosophy and is constantly reading philosophy and talking to me about different philosophers and different ways of life.

I'm comfortable, culturally I'm American, my perspectives are American, but from an aesthetic perspective do other people look at me and think that I'm American?

When I turned 50, something clicked in my head and I said, 'I'm not going to live to 100. I'm half-cooked already.' I set the family down and I said, 'Listen everybody, we're now entering the decade of Daddy. We're going to start doing things that I want to do.'

When I joined the family business, our clients were mostly on the marketing side, from Morris the Nine Lives Cat to KFC's Colonel Sanders.

My kitchen is my baby. I don't have kids, so cooking is sort of like my child. Renovating my kitchen has allowed me to channel my creativity the way parents work on a nursery. The centerpiece is my vintage 1950s Wedgewood stove.

I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.