There's not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers - Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, people who understand the joy of the imagination. ↗
As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth. ↗
And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go. ↗
In a chemistry class there was a guy sitting in front of me doing what looked like a jigsaw puzzle or some really weird kind of thing. He told me he was writing a computer program. ↗