My journalist sensibilities have guided me toward the types of projects I've gone for, even though the projects have been fairly diverse. It always has to have that interesting to attract me, I think.
I'm really lucky in the sense that I have the privilege of being able to pick and choose what I do and only pick projects I really love and feel I can bring something to and I can learn from.
I think that America is more diverse than ever before, and is continuing to become more diverse, and our content should and is reflecting that.
I always try to pick projects by: Is this something that excites me? What are the people like to work with? Obviously you spend a lot of time in a room together with them, so I always try to find projects that hopefully have great people attached.
In a sense it's a lot crazier when you're on the road and it's a lot less stable, but it's actually really healthy for me because it keeps me from isolating, which I tend to do a lot.
It's bad timing, but a lot of kids become teenagers just as their parents are hitting their mid-life crisis. So everybody's miserable and confused and seeking that new sense of identity.
I actually don't do much to my hair. It gets fussed over a lot on projects because there's a lot of it, and it's boy's hair, but as far as me, I tend to let it do what it wants.
After the '30s, we said, "no more Munichs." And it got us in a lot of problems. Then we said, "No more Vietnams." Now if we say, "No more Iraqs," the next one won't be an Iraq. It will be something different. You can't learn lessons.
There are more kids playing hockey, and the game has become more diverse from a cultural, ethnic and geographic point of view, but we still don't have a lot of congressmen.
Literary science fiction is a very, very narrow band of the publishing business. I love science fiction in more of a pop-culture sense. And by the way, the line between science fiction and reality has blurred a lot in my life doing deep ocean expeditions and working on actual space projects and so on. So I tend to be more fascinated by the reality of the science-fiction world in which we live.
I tend to follow a scattershot approach to reading a lot of very diverse subjects interest me, and I'm quite happy to read stuff on any of them.
After I got disciplined I got introduced to football and then after that everything just took off for me. I had a lot of role models: the teachers, the coaches. Watching them give so much to so many students so they can be successful in life basically just ingrained in me that I think it's more gratifying for me to give back and than just to receive.
I commit words to paper and the Internet for everyone to pick apart, so I think I tend to be a lot more cynical and dulled.
I'm a counterpuncher. I don't have a choice. If you look what they say about me, it's terrible. I mean, they say terrible things about me. Bobby Jindal - I mean, you talk about lightweights, this guy is a real lightweight. And he hit me - I don't even know this man - and he hit me because - and they're not hitting me on fact. They're hitting me in order to try to pick up something in their polls.
I thought me hitting you and you not hitting me and me making you miss and even throwing more than you means that I won a fight.
I try to widen the horizons of every child I meet, and part of that is promoting diverse forms, be it graphic novels, stories told in a narrative voice, or more translated books, as well as more diverse writers and more diverse characters.