Our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit... Santa who was jolly - but let's face it he was also very judgmental.

Santa Barbara is my hood. I mean it's not much of a hood but it is definitely like my hood. I claim Santa Barbara like I claim my family. I'm going to be married and buried there.

If we talk about the environment for example we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

Believe in love. Believe in magic. Hell believe in Santa Clause. Believe in others. Believe in yourself. Believe in your dreams. If you don't who will?

My parents moved to American Samoa when I was three or four years old. My dad was principal of a high school there. It was idyllic for a kid. I had a whole island for a backyard. I lived there until I was eight years old and we moved to Santa Barbara.

We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus but our ideas about Santa Claus change mature and become more nuanced whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.

I think the true test of a pop song for me and I've talked to a lot of other writers about this is you take your demo you pop it in your car and you drive down Sunset Blvd. to Santa Monica and that's the Hollywood car test.

There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara California Sunday 20 January 1963' consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says.