I feel as though I've fooled the world into thinking I'm an adult and now they're letting me procreate.

I used cartoons as diaries. I still do. They're my way of figuring out the world, what's happening to me or what I'm thinking about.

I like to think of the world's greatest athlete coming up to bat against me - Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, I don't care who it is - and I'm looking at him thinking, you have no chance.

I wake up at night thinking about Euripides' 'Hecuba.' That to me is a story that says so much about what it is to be a human being in the middle of a world of unreliable things and people.

I took a course on 'Magic, Alchemy, and Astrology' at Mount Holyoke, and it was a whole new awakening for me, a way of thinking about the world primarily in terms of concepts and words rather than mathematical formulas.

When people told me that I couldn't do something, I wanted to always prove them wrong. That comes a lot from people always bullying me because of my size and not thinking that I could do anything to impact the world or inspire other people.

The difference between me and, say, the opera critic is that I'm charged with thinking about the world beyond opera. I could go see 'Die Fledermaus', for instance. I've never done any of this, by the way. I've never written about one opera since I've had this job.

A lot of people would write to me long stories from their lives, and I felt they were thinking of me as some sort of treasure chest to keep their secrets. I felt like sometimes they would tell me stories they wouldn't tell anybody else in the whole world. And I loved these stories.

People ask me, 'What were you thinking during that game-winning penalty kick in the 2011 World Cup?' I was actually thinking absolutely nothing. I just walked up there and was so inspired by my teammates who rocked all their PKs; they just killed it. I figured I might as well do the same, or they might have my neck.

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