At the school I attended, the clergyman who ran the cathedral school in Shanghai would give lines to the boys as a punishment. They expected you to copy out, say, 20 or 30 pages from one of the school texts. But I found that rather than laboriously copying out something from a novel by Charles Dickens, it was easier if I made it up myself.
The rise or fall of Shanghai means the birth or death of the whole nation.
Shanghai set out to take over from Hong Kong and I think it's done that. It's got the most amazing futuristic skyline which rivals and even betters Tokyo.
When you're walking around in Shanghai, I called it the City of Near Misses, because they do not stop for pedestrians. And the pedestrians do not have the right of way. It's those little things that no one tells you.
And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity, it's like a set in a movie.
I was in Shanghai recently, where Twitter is blocked, and yet there were ads and billboards across town with hashtags on them.
New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn't even sit down, and not just because there is no room.
Today we're dealing with metropolitan Shanghai, metropolitan New Delhi or Paris. If we're competing at that level, our diversity, that richness of people coming from so many different backgrounds, is one of our greatest advantages.
I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai.
I went to China for a brief working visit, and I thought that Shanghai was interesting, but Beijing totally grabbed me.