I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender.

As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women's department within Tiffany Studios.

Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation.

I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.

Problems are hidden opportunities, and constraints can actually boost creativity.

Something happens to our creativity as we go through the education process; most of us lose touch with it.

Innovating today is about creativity; it is about the freedom to act... if you look at the big conglomerate... it's highly regulated. It's a lot of talk about... internal controls and this and that... so there's a huge mindshift change to get the best of people.

I love the fact that people can relate to what I'm saying, even if it's not for the same subject I was writing about. That is the power of real music and real expression.