Neil Jackson

Being an actor, you can get spoilt a little bit: car services come and pick you up, you get put up in nice hotels, people fetch you coffee, and so on. It is wonderful, but you can get lost in that world pretty quickly and start believing that it is real life.

It's funny - when I first started as an actor, obviously there were long periods of being idle and all you want to do is work. So if I ever get the compulsion to feel like I should complain or feel like I want to take a break, I just remember how I was before and be very grateful for it.

I actually didn't listen to the Beatles song 'Nowhere Man' when I was writing my book of the same name. What I listened to a lot was 'Abbey Road.' Its disjointedness and its readiness to confuse only to delight were inspiring to me.

The way I see it is that I grew up with a good set of values, but it was never too strict. I was always encouraged to be a free-thinking individual. I spent the first five years out of high school trying to make it work in Eau Claire, then I had to leave because there wasn't enough going on in town.