So in my sophomore year, I took a senior anatomy class. I thought anatomy - being the thing that I should be most interested in - and if I could hack, as we called it, a senior class, I would continue. I didn't hack the senior class.
My mental approach is totally different. My coach predicated everything on defense. He always talked about defense, defense, defense. I took it to heart that if you play defense, you can take the heart from an offensive player.
Again, I was influenced by my father, who was very much an atheist and took pride in combating the traditional or orthodox forms of Judaism, which his parents and which my mother's parents were very steeped in.
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.
I had a meeting in LA in which they took a really overstuffed hour and a half. It was as close to old Hollywood as I remembered it in the last 20 years.
I guess I had a suspicion of it my entire life without knowing exactly what it was - knowing that there was something different about me, which I attributed to being an artist. At 11 or 12 I started sort of clarifying for myself. It took a while.
I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.
I love the romance of the '40s. It was the perfect time to live. Technology wasn't so advanced that it made life more difficult, but it was just enough that you can send a phone call or a telegram. And people still took pride in how they looked. The men got dressed up and the women got dressed up and they took care of themselves.
In 1967, the world health community launched a global effort to eradicate smallpox. It took a coordinated, worldwide effort, required the commitment of every government, and cost $130 million dollars. By 1977, smallpox had disappeared.
For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems - but I knew she wanted to be married.
As an avid photographer, I also took advantage of the latest technology in photography - digital photography - to post photos on my website on a daily basis.
It took a long while for me to know that I'm beautiful. I remember going through this phase when I was younger of wanting to pass by mirrors and not look at them. That was so ridiculous. I've learned now that beauty starts from within.
I was in Kansas for about a month, and we worked most of the time in a very small town, so it felt like the production basically took the whole town over. In a way, we were the Martians in Kansas.
I moved to Kentish Town from Chelsea in 1983, partly because I had a lot of friends already living in the area and because it took an hour off the journey to my house in Suffolk. It has a villagey feel, and it's still a very mixed community, which I like.
I took some classes in sign language when I was in my early teens because I was told that I would be completely deaf very early. But I never really wanted to learn.
On two occasions, utility executives I'd never met had looked at me and said, 'I thought you'd be bigger!' In a way, I took that as a compliment!
It took me a while to figure that out and to realize what a gift that I had been given. And when I finally did, I dedicated myself to be the best pitcher I possibly could be, for as long as I possibly could be.
My character in 'Cocktail' was different from my personality. Homi Adajania took me to London, showed me how girls dress and behave there. I had not seen that kind of lifestyle before.
The ceremony took six minutes. The marriage lasted about the same amount of time though we didn't get a divorce for almost a year.
I booked my first series when I was 13. Acting kind of took control because I was just going from part to part at that point.
I took the rhythm place, which a lot of people didn't know how to do the way I could, and this was really the first time that Johnny had a rhythm guitar player.
It took me time to realize that the men who won Olympic gold medals in the decathlon are just men, just like me.
The very idea of carrying my memory into eternity devastated me, and I took refuge in atheism.
I worked harder at my craft, and it took some time, but here I am today doing what I want to do, which is entertain people.
I just have a connection with sign language. I always thought the deaf community was a different community to be a part of. In high school, me and my friend took sign language.
The wedding took place in Vermont, where they have legalized gay civil unions, and I married a woman.
I remember having friends in high school that did the theater department stuff, and I always wanted to try it but never had the guts to. I was the class clown but could never really build up the courage to try it. I took one acting class and really enjoyed it.
Mike Krieger and I started talking, and he decided he liked the idea of helping start the company. Once he joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood.
An accent like mine and a face like mine, I think a lot of the time it's easy for casting directors to just stick me in as a bad boy, but 'Being Human' took a risk on me - bless 'em - and I'm not that bad boy no more.
My auntie Anne took me to 'Phantom of the Opera' in London. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
Sometimes I write quickly, sometimes I spend several weeks on a single poem. I would really love for readers not to be able to guess which of the poems took so much work!
Honestly, I expected to get a cold reception because of my subject matter. But when editors took a look at the story I had to tell, and saw that this was not a parochial story at all, they really warmed to it.
These thieves defend themselves by saying, 'I was there all the time, and the officials missed me.' Favorite excuses for missing surveillance checkpoints: jacket covered the number took off the shirt with the number hidden in a crowd.
When I took the job as the manager of the Olympic team, I didn't take it because I was a Dodger. I did it because I was an American, and I wanted to bring that gold medal where it belongs in baseball, the United States. And that's exactly what our team did.
I got into music when I was a little boy. My dad was always into jazz. I got my education from him. The first time I listened to jazz, he gave me a Thelonious Monk record. It was so different from anything I had ever heard. It took me a while to understand it, and I liked that. I liked the fact that it wasn't immediately palatable.
It took Cianfrance 12 years to bring 'Blue Valentine' to the screen after he first conceived it. He found Gosling and Williams early on, and they hung in there with him. The film finally premiered at Sundance 2010, then screened at Cannes and the Toronto Film Festival before landing in theaters in December.
