Follow your gut, make a choice, and throw yourself into it. If you make a mistake, then you have merely afforded yourself a valuable lesson.

I grew up in a small town in Illinois, and my dad was a basketball coach. Thanks to him, I have excellent fundamentals in both basketball and baseball.

People keep referring to me as a standup, and that just doesn't sit well with me because a lot of my friends are standups and they're brilliant at writing jokes, and I'm not.

I think that purity creates not only a higher level of artistic vision but a purer work ethic.

Of course smartphones are brilliant inventions, but the nefarious thing about Twitter and other social media is that it starts to fill all the gaps in your day. I quickly become an addict.

I don't put a great deal of stock in art trophies.

I first read Wendell Berry's short-story collections, "Fidelity" and then "Watch with Me." They just knocked my socks off. The characters and the fellowship of the small town reminded me of my own small town in Illinois.Then I discovered that, much like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, that all of Berry's fiction was centered in this same town.