i never forget years ago sitting with gore vidal, two friends of mine in austria, having lunch and gore said in his super silly way, what are you working on now my dear? she said oh, i'm writing my memoirs. he said, at last, you are turning your hand to fiction. [laughter] you know, i mentioned earlier i studied and was friends with berlin who wrote a great -- on tolstoy called a hedgehog and the fox, and he's quoting the great greek who said the hedgehog has one big idea, and the fox as many ideas. and i'm a fox, but as a fox we always love the other day and i'm in love with hedgehogs. and only write about monsters and hedgehogs. jesus is a big hedgehog of course. gore vidal is a hedgehog. he only has one idea, we know what that was. but tolstoy had commuted, he was the ultimate hedgehog, and frost was a hedgehog. and remember, i made a joke yesterday about when i wrote a novel about tolstoy and the sentiment mother and she said, was to start writing books about me? [laughter] -- stop writing books about me. it seemed like a terrible joke she was making, and she was serious but i reali

peck's presentation and the blue and grey or sam waters whispering at the railroad station and gore vidal's lincoln and they went on this flight of imagination, a camera back at the end of the crowd leaves falling from the trees in november,, wind up scaring the word and not everyone paying attention. and only then, maybe at at the last minute would there be a huge close-up of lincoln's face and you hear the word. this made it all worthwhile. rather than listening to each other because we just heard the difference between a screenwriter and the director and mere chroniclers of fact. but then the next thing that happened obviously is that dreamworks and disney asked me this summer or early in the summer to do a young reader's companion book and sort of expand on the evolution of lincoln's views on opportunity and quality and they did a fall. it was a flip-flopper in that sense of the words that i was a privilege too. >> after i think that i had a first draft, sometime after the first draft we contacted you and asked you and jim macpherson as well as doris too serves are you a run of the firs