I am essentially an entertainer and a storyteller.

I'm going to die with my mind intact. And to me that is the most exciting way you could possibly die.

My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.

People say I don't write books, I make Christmas presents.

The only thing that's authentic about what a writer writes is his work.

What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.

Advertising seemed almost natural to me because it was a business where you had to inform, persuade and educate. And so from being a junior copywriter to being the creative director of one of the largest advertising agencies in the country took me 4.5 years, which is, well, a fairly spectacular rise.

Advertising was only meant to be a very small part of my life. I had intended that I would work extensively in journalism for about five or six years and then I'd become a writer.

I guess my use-by date is just about up but if I could come back as a storyteller now, I would be jumping over the moon because wow, just think what's available.

I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor.

I watch people get older and lose their intellectual acuity; you lose that sharpness, that cleanness, that brain that you worked so hard on and that you were gifted with and lose the gifts that were given.

If I were king of the world there wouldn't be boat people, there would only be people coming in boats. I would mix us all up so that we were all exactly one shade of each other.

My job, and that's my job, is to dress the naked truth. To make it interesting, to make it viable, to make it seem like something you understand and feel and love.

The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.