The big thing in my family growing up is that everybody had to play a musical instrument. We were like the von Trapps.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

When I was a child, I was one of the kids who wore black all the time, and when the kids asked me why I wore black, I said things like, 'I'm mourning the death of modern society.' I mean, I was a riot.

My parents were very permissive when it came to animals. As long as we earned the money to buy them and built whatever structure it was they were going to live in, we could have any kind of pet we wanted. They would have let us have a rhinoceros if we could have afforded it.

A woman wants to be romanced. She wants to be an essential part of a great adventure; she wants a beauty to unveil. That is what little girls play at, and those are the movies women love and the stories that they love.

My job is to be a spokesman - the spokesman, I suppose - for the President, for the White House, to do the daily briefings, to manage the press corps in terms of travel, day-to-day needs, access, interviews, all those issues.

American Odyssey' will be an amazing adventure inside the musical walls of our cities. It's theater, and radio has always been great theater to me.

I've been lucky enough to meet a lot of fantastic people, from royalty to rock stars. I've also been known to be a bit of a daredevil, so I've tried to explore extreme travel and adventure - scuba-diving in an arctic glacier and camping in the Himalayas.