What I wanted to do was drown something enormous, like a Star Trek or Star Wars kind of space opera-type thing, but actually make it about someone who was just married to the wrong guy, and that guy just happens to be this amazing dictator, and she has to get her kids as far away as possible from this guy. So something that could almost be a TV movie, if you'd ground it and set it in Wisconsin or something like that, but to give it this enormous setting.

Cookbooks are almost a substitution for a lost sense of culture. People want some other life than the one they're living, so they buy a cookbook with pictures and imagine themselves as part of that life.

I didn't want the headache of having a publisher reviewing everything I wrote in advance.

The trick was really finding the appropriate publisher for each of the projects I'd devised.

Decision-making is a skill. Wisdom is a leadership trait.

If you don't demonstrate leadership character, your skills and your results will be discounted, if not dismissed.

Anytime something becomes a success in this way you always get imitators. I'm an imitator of the guys I love. I imitate people like Frank Miller, who is a huge inspiration to me.