My parents, grandmother and brother were teachers. My mother taught Latin and French and was the school librarian. My father taught geography and a popular class called Family Living, the precursor to Sociology, which he eventually taught. My grandmother was a beloved one-room school teacher at Knob School, near Sonora in Larue County, Ky.

Life magazine ran a page featuring me and three other girls that was clearly the precursor of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues.

Every intelligence agency in the world believed that Saddam Hussein had had weapons of mass destruction, precursor chemicals. The inspectors, over a period of ten years, had managed to gain access to much of those precursor chemicals.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

When I was 8 or 9, I started using bulletin board systems, which was the precursor to the Internet, where you'd dial into... a shared system and shared computers. I've had an email address since the late '80s, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then I got on the Internet in '93 when it was first starting out.

Life magazine ran a page featuring me and three other girls that was clearly the precursor of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past just as it is bound to modify the future.