It's cool to meet your idols. It's a good opportunity to travel. Those kinds of things are good.

I've been lucky to travel through quite a bit of Europe and Australia, but I would love to do Asia and South America and South Africa.

The more you travel, the better you get at it. It sounds silly, but with experience you learn how to pack the right way. I remember one of my first trips abroad, travelling around Europe by rail, fresh out of high school. I brought all these books with me and a paint set. I really had too much stuff, so I've learnt to be more economical.

Japan is the most intoxicating place for me. In Kyoto, there's an inn called the Tawaraya which is quite extraordinary. The Japanese culture fascinates me: the food, the dress, the manners and the traditions. It's the travel experience that has moved me the most.

I travel a lot. If you look at my suitcase, everything is extremely well-packed and well-folded people who travel with me are impressed at how organized I am. Some would refer to me as a maniac for this.

There are days when I intentionally don't write. For instance, I never write when I'm traveling, because travel is a situation where I can learn more by looking and listening than by working.

But I want people to understand that poker's not all glamorous, it's not all being on TV and making tons of money. It's a hard life. It's a lot of travel. It's a lot of weird hours.

Even when my parents were together, they both had to travel and work, and it wasn't like they had nine-to-five jobs. In that way, it wasn't a normal family life.

A major league pitching coach is a really difficult job. It takes a big commitment in terms of time, travel and workload.

When you're an artist, there's always a moment in your life when you think you're not inspired and instead of doing things and instead of travel and instead of falling in love, you're just depressed, so you don't move, so you don't change. So you're not inspired.