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I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man.

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.

I had an inspirational teacher at my junior school: Peter Nixon. He was enthusiastic, knowledgeable and slightly scary - a good combination for a teacher.

My mentor in college was Stephen Shore. I loved his color palettes and his taking mundane things but finding them fascinating.

Greg Berlanti, David Nutter, Andrew Kreisberg and Marc Guggenheim are the people I wanted to work with. They're smart, they're funny, they're cool, they're edgy.

My favorite favorites are people like Bunuel, Fellini and Charlie Chaplin.

The Yale group was doing the Harold. So by our senior year we were trying to do the Harold. Again, we had no idea what we were doing. We had one guy in the group who was pretty experimental; he would kind of push us to do weird things. It was really fun, a great experience.

John was the smartest and most amazing comedian I've ever worked with. I think more than teaching me about acting or comedy, he taught me about life and the love of people and respect of people.

My teacher, my great cello teacher Leonard Rose, was such a great cellist, and nurturing man, very patient. But I grew up not only admiring him, but obviously Casals, Rostrotovich, Jacqueline du Pre, and many others, including many of my peers and contemporaries.

If you don't know Tom Lehrer, you should - in addition to being a classical pianist, mathematician, songwriter, satirist, researcher at Los Alamos and, he claims, inventor of the Jell-O shot, he is just delightfully funny and graceful.