When I started out back in Louisville there was Harry Collins. He was my first teacher. He saw that I was so obsessed with magic that he taught me the love of magic.

I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons.

I started the class late. The teacher said I would have to learn as much in half a year that the others learned in a year. I did it.

I was 20 years old working as a roofer and a telemarketer and driving a taxi just barely getting by. A friend of a friend suggested I try acting. I was like 'Why? What am I going to do? Community theater?' But I took a class and the teacher thought that I had potential so I moved to Vancouver and started auditioning.

I had a great drama teacher in high school and that's when I started to learn about the history of theater.

When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'

My store Wine Library outsells big national chains. How do you think we do it? It started with hustle. I always say that our success wasn't due to my hundreds of online videos about wine that went viral but to the hours I spent talking to people online afterward making connections and building relationships.

My career started young and I was really ambitious and then I had success and I hung out with people who were much older. I think I might have been temporally misplaced so I thought I was 40. It was a premature midlife crisis.

They thought I was a success as soon as I started paying the bills.

Eventually with success I started to feel more and more isolated - like I didn't have a community of artists.

We moved into the back made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

I sort of understood that when I first started: that you shouldn't repeat a success. Very often you're going to and maybe the first time you do it works. And you love it. But then you're trapped.

What I have in common with the character in 'Truman' is this incredible need to please people. I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

I've always been really athletic which really helped because when I first started doing the training for Bulletproof Monk it required so much strength that if I didn't have a base I don't really know what I would have done.

I was vegetarian for a long time and in the last four years I started eating chicken and fish. I feel like it really built up my strength a lot.

The only concept or experience or core belief that I can attribute my other-ness to is that I just started out a weirdo and I stayed a weirdo. And it took me a long time to embrace my outsidership and see it as a strength rather than a weakness.