More often than not, punches underwhelm - too fizzy, too fruity, too sherbet-y, and/or too baroque, the flavors all muddled into the boozy equivalent of the water left over from cleaning watercolor brushes.

When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper.

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.

Twitter is a place where you share your thoughts, yourself... you don't want a plain white backdrop for that. You want the entire page to say something about who you are. Designer or not, if the urge strikes you, go for it. Put up that watercolor you've never shown anyone. Take a photo of that hat you just knitted... whatever it is, share it.

Our memories, the way we tend to experience them, are sort of fuzzy around the edges, like a watercolor that has bled into the past and is not totally clear.

Honestly, I'd love to say I live this amazing Hollywood lifestyle, but actually, I'm at home with my same friends and cooking. I crochet, I do watercolor. I think what surprised me the most is that that isn't the lifestyle everyone necessarily lives.

I'd rather lose large than win slightly. I think life is an oil painting, not a watercolor.

Only once in the last thirty years have I made a duplicate, and that was a watercolor from my oil picture now owned by the Layton Art Gallery, Milwaukee, called 'Hark! the Lark.'

To me, that's one of the things that I love about doing this stuff. One day I can work on this piece in watercolor, and then work on something else on the computer, or work on something else that's a completely different approach.

This isn't a watercolor, it's a mural.

When I travel, I always take my Winsor & Newton watercolor kit, which is the size of a pack of cigarettes when folded up. I bought my first one in the 1980s. It was handy to bring on trips, and I packed it into a leather pouch along with a couple of brushes, a pencil, an eraser and paper.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

The much-lauded visual artist Roni Horn got her Master's in Sculpture from Yale in the Seventies, but in the course of her career she has moved, among other media, from watercolors to photographs to floor-sized installations and mats of poured gold.

It's such a human condition, whether you're a great track star or a great knitting person or you paint watercolors - someone knows who you are.

I especially love all the instruments of art: inks, pens, paintbrushes, watercolors and oils, fine papers and canvases, and although I love to mess around with these tools and objects, I have minimal artistic skills.

You will see - in the future, I will live by my watercolors.

I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolors of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have done erotic pictures?

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

My drawings at first were made altogether in watercolors, but they wanted softness and a great deal of finish.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.