The opportunity to carry water every night to James Earl Jones on stage is a dream come true.

I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon.

The sad fact is that the vast majority of drunks stay drunks. There's a small minority of us who reach that fork in the road where one side says 'live' and the other says 'drink'.

I've seen more convincing wigs on William Shatner.

The copies of The Catcher In The Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird that I own look like they were printed yesterday, and there's not a nick, not a blur, there's not any fading on the jacket at all, because they were taken and protected. A limited edition, by nature, is limited, and also probably more protected because of that. I'd rather have a first trade edition than a special one of 25 that was made years later, even if it's signed by the author. The trade edition is the Holy Grail.

Write more. That's the advice I would give myself.

It's amazing being a member of perhaps the last analog generation - being born in the late '40s, growing up in the '50s and '60s, when it was still a very analog world. And in New Orleans those days, the country was just next door, as it were. You didn't have to travel miles and miles to get out in the woods. There's tons of fishing, obviously, in New Orleans, and tons of hunting. That was part of the cycle of life, to get fresh meat from the butcher or go duck hunting and get it yourself. It wasn't malicious or insensitive. It was just there, and you used it.