During my teens and early 20s, I proved to be anything but what most people expected Billy Graham's son to be. I'm so thankful he never gave up on me or quit loving me.

I was totally dominated and revered my father. I admired everything he did. He was a great sports person. He loved me. I was his only boy at that time, before my brother Billy came along.

I love Billy Wilder, and I love the way that his films can be very touching and very moving and very romantic, and at the same time there's always a little cynical undertone, there's always something that undercuts things.

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.

I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.

I'm a bit of a loner, you know? I'm more quiet by nature. And coming from, you know, hillbilly country, I'm probably more reserved.

My mom thought I could dance because I used to dance to this Janet Jackson song she'd play when I was a baby. Then she would take me to a Saturday dance school. I used to go every week and got spotted by a scout, who suggested I audition for the role of Billy in 'Billy Elliot the Musical.'

I was born William. My father was William. I came from a big family, I hated being called Billy. Willem's a nickname; it's a Dutch name, very common in the Netherlands.

I think 'Charming Billy' ultimately is a novel about faith and what we believe in and, above all, what we choose to believe in.

I got to work with Dustin Hoffman on a film called 'Billy Bathgate.' I got to work with Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn and Bob Zemeckis on 'Death Becomes Her.' There are still a few actors out there that I would like to work with.

Terry Funk. Any time I got to wrestle with him, it was cool. Superstar Billy Graham was another one.

I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself.

I gleaned different style ideas over the years. In Southern California, there is a big rockabilly sub-culture. So when I would go to car shows, I would see women dressed like this. I had a teacher in high school that always had her Bette Paige bangs.

I've got a role in the new Billy Bob Thornton movie that Billy Bob wrote and is going to direct called 'Jayne Mansfield's Car.' I only have four scenes, but I have as much dialogue as anybody in the movie.

Chase muttered the likes of "Come on, you big bitch." However, Billy stood on the bridge like a sentry, quiet and focused. His body was at the helm, but I could tell his mind was swimming beside this great fish. I could picture these two physically imposing creatures staring each other down, neither one willing to blink, both animals stubborn and hardened by decades of being on the reef.

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines-well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads-that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco-the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me.

All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once.

Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish-a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow-to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested . . . Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.

When I had a job catering I catered a wedding for the Smashing Pumpkins bassist in Indiana. And I served Billy Corgan shrimp off a tray.

I'm not going to have a perfect career. It's better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.

Billy Tauzin is one of the most interesting people in Washington. He is smart funny and interesting.

Billy is a funny cheeky lovely boy and I love being with him. Parenthood is terrifying though. I can barely walk past a building without panicking that it's going to collapse on his head.

Billy Crystal knows how to make people laugh. He's got 30 years on stage... there's no telling him what's funny.

I was a hop-around. I hung out with the rockabilly crew the guys who were trying to be rappers the funny kids.