Donal Logue

I played on this soccer team, called Hollywood United, and there were a lot of old ex-international pro-players. We played this benefit match at the Rose Bowl, and the crowd streamed in. It's so nerve-wracking to go out into a stadium, feeling a billion eyes upon you when you mess up your touches. That's an overwhelming environment.

A college football star, by his senior year, is used to running out there with 110,000 people going nuts. They feel comfortable in that environment. To me, a set feels like that. The one thing that I do know is that, as long as I'm prepared, I know this environment and this world.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.