How’d he do that?

From the NYTimes, an interesting video interview with John Irving about his upcoming novel Last Night in Twisted River and his writing process.  Not what I would have imagined!  At the very end of the interview, the author is asked to read his first and last lines of the novel since he had been talking about them.  He then proceeds to set them up and gives them from memory (or so it seemed to me and believably so).