I was the guy on the swim team entertaining the bus on the way to the meets.

There seems to be something poetically that doesn't work or is limiting when you call God 'God' in a poem. When I tried to be honest with myself in my relationship with God, Christ is, on the one hand, completely dark, he's transcendent and unknown. On the other hand, he is completely imminent and completely knowable as Jesus. Our tradition speaks of him in both ways as transcendent but also as a lover who comes to us, and the two word 'Dark One' seem to me to contain both things, the transcendence and otherness of Christ, but also like a kind of dark lover who comes to us.

My mum passing away wasn't funny, but that funeral and what I went through, the things that happened, looking back at it, there were funny moments. You have to be strong enough to look back at it, to sit and assess the situation.

My experiences in life are getting bigger and better. The more stuff I do, the more stuff I talk about - having kids, traveling, going through relationship problems, dealing with things in my own family. All that stuff builds character.

I don't think comedy will ever die.

So unless we form some kind of adequate relationship to death, we're never going to live properly, and if we think of it purely as a medical thing, we have reduced life. We should think of it as some sort of mystery which we can participate in now, not something to be pushed off to one side till the last moments.

I am who I am. That's why my friends and peers respect and appreciate me. I don't change or cater my actions to fit my surroundings. I'm myself 24/7. People appreciate that.