My imagination completely controls me, and forever feeds the fire that burns with dark red light in my heart by bringing me the best dreams. I've always had a wild imagination, a big heart and a tortured soul so I feel that dark fantasy, love and horror are in my blood.

My brother once lit his leg on fire. And after, when the fire was finally out, his leg was covered in third-degree burns. And we made the decision - or my parents did - not to take him to the hospital but to treat that at home with a salve my mother made of comfrey and lobelia.

My biggest hope for the future is that we're successful in delivering the treatment to people through the charity and that burns just become something that happens in people's lives but doesn't make them a misfit in society and exclude them and stop all their dreams and ambitions.

We talk a lot on 'Biggest Loser' about how fitness is a natural antidepressant, how it burns off stress. What I like about running is that it gives me time alone. I'm always busy, with people at work, with my kids. I love getting out for a run by myself and just listening to my music.

I have a running conversation with a couple of colleagues. Mike Schmidt's one of them; some on my White House team are others; Alex Burns on the politics team is another. That just helps me not lose my place, right? We're just constantly talking about what we're hearing and where things are.

I want to get into producing. I really learned a lot from 'Girls Next Door.' Kevin Burns is a great producer. He's really talented, and he taught me a lot. I'm just looking forward to spreading the wings a little bit. Five seasons on 'Girls Next Door' was great, but it gets a little repetitive.

While 'The Wire' feels startlingly lifelike, it is not, in fact, a naturalistic depiction of ghetto life. That kind of realism better describes an earlier miniseries of Simon's, 'The Corner,' which was based on the book of the same title that he and Ed Burns wrote, set in the same Baltimore ghetto.

Obama's entire foreign policy was predicated on the notion that by existing, he would bridge all gaps and bury all hatchets. Instead, the Muslim world burns his picture even as he tells them he respects their radicalism. It turns out that diversity is a one-way street for the devotees of global Islam.

I have great respect for people who live out their beliefs. For example, Ed Begley Jr. is an environmentalist, but he really lives his lives, and is he very prudent in the way he lives. He's cautious. He's not like an Al Gore that flies around in a private jet and burns 20,000 gallons a day on his jet.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

If I was to direct a movie about a super-confident guy, first of all I would hate that character. I can do a super-confident guy who crashes and burns and has to rebuild himself as somebody humble. But a super-confident guy that just gets more confident and gets the girl and the money and more success? That's not interesting.

Environmental concern is a little like dieting or paying off credit-card debt - an episodically terrific idea that burns brightly and then seems to fade when we realize there's a reason we need to diet or pay down our debt. The reason is that it's really, really hard, and too many of us in too many spheres of life choose the easy over the hard.

The smells are very strong on 'Game of Thrones': the incense, the fire, the heat of all the burns. The smell of Lancel's Faith Militant cloth is very thick in my nostrils right now. And I think the warmth of it all: the hard work ethics, the ambiance, the temperature of the set. There are so many sensory memories of it, which will never leave me.

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