I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.
I've always been fascinated and stared at maps for hours as a kid. I've especially been most intrigued by the uninhabited or lonelier places on the planet. Like Greenland, for instance, or just recently flying over Alaska and a chain of icy, mountainous islands, uninhabited.
I recently passed through Mumbai airport. I cannot claim it was a pleasant experience. But if I had a choice between Mumbai airport and Euston on a Sunday afternoon, I'd take Mumbai any day.
I was on Oprah's show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn't even go into my family, who had the most influence.
I believed in God my whole life, and then strayed away from it in my teen-age years, until recently.
More recently, I used guitar synthesizer extensively on the two albums I did with Robert Fripp.
Recently I read that half the world or more has read 'The Lord of The Rings,' but then I found out that something like 75 per cent of the world knows the 'Tintin' books.
My daughter recently reminded me not to get so busy making a living, I forget to make a life and I'm going to take that advice.
In recent years, anyone in the government, certainly anyone in the FBI or the CIA, or recently, in again, Clint's film, In the Line of Fire, the main bad guy is the chief advisor to the president.
My grandmother, who passed away at the beginning of November, had a core adage in her life that 'life is not about what happens to you but about what you do with what happens to you.' She recently had been cajoling me and challenging me to do more with my life. To lead more of a purposefully public life.
