It was very much like Norman Rockwell: small town America. We walked to school or rode our bikes, stopped at the penny candy store on the way home from school, skated on the pond.
I started life washing cars in Canada before moving on to selling life insurance and vacuum cleaners. Later, I went through a programme by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, which literally changed my life. It was the turning point.
I'd love to spend more time on the Isle of Man. I love the anonymity of putting on a boiler suit and going down to buy parts for the compressor. And Norman Wisdom's a neighbour; I salute him occasionally.
You can't prove Rembrandt is better than Norman Rockwell - although if you actually do prefer Rockwell, I'd say you were shunning complexity, were secretly conservative, and hadn't really looked at either painter's work. Taste is a blood sport.
It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer's life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.
What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of 'The Naked and the Dead' and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of 'The Village Voice.'
Nobody complains that Bernini's sculptures are too darn real, right? Or that Norman Rockwell's paintings are too creepy. Well, robots can seem real and be loved, too. We're trying to make a new art medium out of robotics.
On Memorial Day, I was out floating on Lake Norman and came across Denny Hamlin. We struck up a conversation, and one of the first things we were talking about was how much it helped him when he started racing the Cup car and how much it helped his Nationwide program.
Hitch was interested in what I had to offer, like one of my background ideas for Norman's upbringing.
Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.