When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with 'Georgia on My Mind.'

I have come to know Diana better than anyone else, so my sympathy will always lie with her. But I also have a huge appreciation of Charles, and what they both had to endure in that marriage. I don't think you can pick a side.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.

I think Ray Charles did as much as anybody when he did his country music album. Ray Charles broke down borders and showed the similarities between country music and R&B.

I do like a lot of the '70s movies. I love Charles Bronson in 'Hard Times.' All my favorite movies where ones from yesteryear. The '70s was a good era. I love all those.

I had a serious and rather drunken research session with the great Charles MacLean, who took me through the history of whisky and malts. I can't remember a thing about it now. In fact I don't think I remembered a thing about it the following morning. Very, very entertaining.

I did live through Katrina and also Hurricane Rita, which hit Lake Charles. Interestingly, when Katrina hit, they evacuated and Lake Charles was one of the evacuation destinations. We opened up the civic center of the city to the evacuees and provided them free medical and psychiatric care there.

William's marriage to Kate Middleton showed that social class, which seemed so important when Prince Charles was looking for a bride in the Eighties, is no longer an issue.

Prince Charles is an absolute Mountbatten. The real intelligence in the royal family comes through my parents to Prince Philip and the children.

In my day, the only people who achieved real independence were my father, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, who, with D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists. Other than that, everybody belonged to the big studios. They had no say in their own careers.

Charles Laughton, who's a great hero of mine, only ever made one film and it happens to be one of the great films ever, which is 'The Night of the Hunter.' It's full of his kind of imagination and creation and how you do things and just in the way he used the studio, I just thought it was a fantastical way of using the studio.

The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.

Harry Reid is not funny; he's creepy. Nancy Pelosi is creepy. Charles Schumer is sneaky and creepy.

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.

The emotions triggered by fiction are very real. When Charles Dickens wrote about the death of Little Nell in the 1840s, people wept - and I'm sure that the death of characters in J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' series led to similar tears.

Karl Malone used a lot of veteran stuff that I thought was cool. Charles Barkley taught me a lot when I played against him. How he would use his body or use his dribble to get people in there and all that stuff. Veteran moves.

Charlestoning is hard. People were fit in the '20s to be able to do that. I guess they didn't sit in front of their computers all day.

I love the holidays - any holiday - but Christmas has always been sort of special because I grew up reading Charles Dickens.

For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' - that I remembered it from childhood.

Joker' was a violent, dark, and brutal book, so I wanted to do something a little less heavy. I played around with the idea of a children's book, and that eventually became 'Noel.' And I just kept finding these parallels between things I could do with Batman and Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol.

Throughout my teenage years, I read 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens every December. It was a story that never failed to excite me, for as well as being a Dickens enthusiast, I have always loved ghost stories.

Prince Charles was once obsessed with a particular beauty, Anna Wallace, and couldn't understand why she walked out on him after he spent the evening dancing with Camilla at the Queen Mother's 80th birthday party.