As far as writing, I like watching bad movies. Nothing stops me in my tracks more than watching a great film like 'The Godfather' or 'Dog Day Afternoon' or 'The Graduate.' You watch one of those, and you never want to write again. Whereas with bad movies, it makes you think, If that counts, I certainly could write.
I can't go to sleep at night if I didn't accomplish at least something. That's the one thing that keeps me up.
The problem with me is, I guess, the way I express myself, you have to be with me 50 years before you can get a sense of what I'm talking about.
People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.
I am not the opposite of theism. I am right in the middle of those non-believers and believers. It's not even about being agnostic or nastik. Why would I take a name given to me by my opposition? I am just a rationalist.
We're so surrounded by so much of this marketing and just being told on a regular basis that you have to like this, you will go here, you want this. I found that to me that fit perfectly into what a theme park of dinosaur would be about.
October's a busy month for me. I usually find myself working but I also try to do one or two conventions in that period. Then whatever city I'm in, they want to drag me to their local horror theme park.
If you want to page me, It's OK! I've actually had guys tell me they were fans from the 'Kim Possible' days. And I've met people who still have the 'Kim Possible' theme song as their ringtone.
There's little kids on trains coming up to me, singing my theme song, and they can barely walk.
At college - I went to Yale, and everybody's very smart, and everybody has their thing that makes them special, and people at Yale would pretend they didn't recognize me. Only after they'd had a couple of drinks would they start singing the 'Life Goes On' theme song.
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
Theodore Roethke was a poet I was raised with so he has a lot of sentimental value for me.
I know the established Christian theology... I know the enemy, but the enemy doesn't know me. Thus the enemy has already lost the war.
That is why one day I said my game will be like the Pythagorean Theorem - hard to figure out. A lot of people really don't know the Pythagorean Theory. They don't make them like me anymore. They don't want to make them like that anymore.
Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.
Math does come easily to me, but I was always much more interested in what theorems imply about the world than in proving them.
When computers came along, I felt for the first time that I had the proper tools for the kind of theoretical work I wanted to do. So I moved over to that, and that got me into psychology.
That for me was the big turning point in my artistic life, when my wife and I had our kids. The world got infused with morality again. Every person in the world should theoretically be loved as much as I love my daughters.
Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist.
Acting for me is very therapeutic. It's my shrink.
