Robert Olen Butler, Author
1. If money were no object, how would you spend your time?
Going to the theater in London night after night.
2. What book impacted your life the most and how?
The collected dramatic works of William Shakespeare. I was, as the son of the chairman of the theater department at St. Louis University, fully aware of and often exposed to Shakespeare from childhood. But I read him in full in an intensively short few months when I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University. What I’d already begun to absorb through my early years, in the way a child can readily learn a second language, finally, fully impacted me as a twenty year-old: the lush rhythms of his language, the dynamic energy of his stories, his deep insight into a remarkable range of characters.
3. Tell us something about you that would surprise most of the people who think they know you.
Though I’ve published eleven books in the past sixteen years, twenty-three books in the past thirty-five, I constantly struggle against the lazy bum of a couch-dweller in me.