Talking to all those great writers and artists for the magazine was a form of graduate school for me.

You sit at a fashion show in another country and you watch all of these paparazzi swarm around a celebrity, only they're a local celebrity, maybe a soap opera star, so you don't have any idea who they are, you just know they're famous to a bunch of stunned Italians. It's weird, because when you can't identify who a celebrity is, they can just look like overslicked stand-ins. That might sound awful, but what I mean is, when you think about most actresses, even in Hollywood, they really aren't that fascinating or glamorous in their own right once you strip away the flashbulbs.

The first horror movie I saw, in first or second grade, was My Bloody Valentine [1981], where there's a deranged killer in a miner mask stalking a small coal town.

To this day I still watch tons of horror.

When you create a fence, you keep people out, but you also limit your mobility.

I had been going out to Orient for several years.

I really believe there is something in the nature of a democracy that naturally leads people to distrust the government, to assume because a democracy is built by people just like themselves that there must be secret plots and cover-ups and wizards behind the scenes running the machine.