My father's best friend, Georgie Terra, was an Italian guy. The children and the cousins and nieces and nephews were children of the Mafia. Those were the children he grew up with. If you want to go to a safe neighborhood, go to where the Mafia is.
I'm very proud of being Italian-American, but people don't realize that the mafia is just this aberration. The real community is built on the working man, the guy who's the cop, the fireman, the truck driver, the bus driver.
I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just don't understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.
Desperation is like stealing from the Mafia: you stand a good chance of attracting the wrong attention.
In my real life, both my bosses are gay. On the 'Real Housewives of Atlanta,' Andy Cohen is gay, everybody at Bravo is gay - we call them the gay mafia. Over at 'Glee' and 'The New Normal,' my boss Ryan Murphy is gay. On the show, my boss, played by Andrew Reynolds, is gay in real life. I'm surrounded by all my gay bosses.
Ultimately, I'd love to see a legacy company that has alumni that come out of it and go on to create other big things. A maple-syrup mafia, a HootSuite mafia.
I came to think that nobody from England could draw American comic books, because they were clearly all done by this sort of Mafia, all these guys with Italian and Irish names who had the whole thing sewn up. It was actually seeing a comic book drawn by Barry Smith, who was about my age, and English.
It was dangerous to hit the wrong kid in my neighborhood, because a lot of the guys I played with had fathers in the Mafia.
Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.
You know, Castle's the kind of guy that when he meets somebody, that's a connection for him. He remains connected to the people that he meets. That's the kind of guy he is, be they criminals, gangster rappers, mafia guys, art thieves, whoever it is, he nurtures those relationships.