My grandfather was a really, really tough no-nonsense factory worker who emigrated from Ireland in about 1900 to Bridgeport, Conn. He had a big effect on me. Those guys who took a great leap out into what they knew not were the ones who were the real stars, the real heroes.
People were telling me it was refreshing I was real because previous 'X Factor' winners were too afraid to say anything. I decided to go against the grain. But I took it too far.
I'm not an original member, though I'm sort of an original member. I've been on a lot of records and took them to great heights. For them to make me the sixth Temptation is quite an honor.
I never took part in the rules and hatred that sometimes go along with religion. But if my parents are happy with what they believe, then I'm happy to stay out of their way. We agree to disagree.
I once came back from a book tour where sleek black cars driven by nice men in black suits waited for me at every hotel, took me to every signing, brought me back, opened car doors for me. They were great. I was great. It was a wonderful tour.
I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.
My voice needed oiling, and then it took off.
When Dad came home from work, he'd turn our family dinners into tutorials on business, money, sales, and profit margins. He shared fascinating stories about his customers, marketing, and my favorite topic when I was a kid - new product launches. Our father also took us to his office before the advent of 'Take Your Child to Work Day.'
To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.
I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.
In China, I had my body lit on fire. And in Russia, I took a bath in reindeer blood, which apparently had some kind of youth-enhancing elements.
One day I actually took the list into the bathroom and I put it up against my face and looked in the mirror and I realized I had one of two choices, change the list or change myself.
I think my parents took me to see Sting when I was very, very young.
When I first lived in a model apartment... It was two bunk beds to a room, and the bathroom was constantly in use. I was bringing in Lucky Charms cereal, and one day an agent put a stop to that. She said, 'You're making all the girls fat.' They took it off our grocery order. That was the most dramatic thing that happened.
'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.
One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set... the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it... could be dismantled overnight.
If a Democrat took Republicans on rudely, they wouldn't be elevated in the Democratic Party. There's a different standard. We're supposed to be polite to people.
Every riff had to be perfect and heavy, collectively what we wanted it to be. If there was one person in the room who went, 'Heh, I don't think it is there yet, guys,' we'd scrap the whole song. I think that took a little bit of songwriting maturity for us.
In my first few years as an actor, I took one terrible TV job after another. But even as I laughed off my awful roles and made fun of myself to friends, my work made me cringe - I dreaded anyone's seeing it. I was crushed that I wasn't doing anything I was proud of.
In the beginning of Roomba, we all took turns answering the support line. Once, a woman called and explained that her robot had a defective motor. I said, 'Send it back. We'll send you a new one.' She said, 'No - I'm not sending you Rosie.'
The writing became a hobby in the background: it took a back seat to parenthood and being a person and being a human being.
As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asia.
All my films are shot on hand-held cameras. These cameras took five years to build and had to be light enough to be carried.
While I do not want to live my life like Lemmy chose to live his, I can't help but admire the strength and determination it took for Lem to do it all on his own terms and remain true to himself.
I can do more than anyone suspects. I pride myself on my versatility. It took 32 years of difficult parts, second leads, villains and juveniles. The Oscar changed the quality of the roles I was being offered.
After I graduated from Brandeis, I took all the money I had in the world, which was $5,000, and I made a short film. I made every mistake you could possibly make. It was a total disaster as a piece of work, and yet, you know, it was ambitious in some way.
Remember, Republican economic policies quadrupled the debt before I took office and doubled it after I left. We simply can't afford to double-down on trickle-down.
The '80s made up for all the abuse I took during the '70s. I outlived all my critics. By the time I retired, everybody saw me as a venerable institution. Things do change.
'Jurassic Park' and 'Star Wars' shoved me into loving sci-fi and film in general when I was a barely coherent 3-year-old. And 'Lord of the Rings' took me to another planet entirely. Before that series, I knew I loved writing, but after, I knew that I had to write.
My mother's belief in spiritual healers grew stronger after our family went through a rough patch following my father's death. Sufi saint Karimullah Shah Kadri changed our lives, and all of us converted to Sufism. But it wasn't an instantaneous decision - it took us 10 years to convert. The change in religion was like washing away the past.
On 'Ant-Man', I took a rubber stamp from the office of Hank Pym, who's played by Michael Douglas.
I took a selfie to prove to myself that I exist!
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
In my business - SAT tutoring - you get used to sighs. A client's mother frets over the sheer amount of work her daughter has to do to get her score up, until she reaches the resigned moment when she will sigh and observe that no one thought you could prepare for the SAT back when she took it - it was 'untutorable.'
I loved writing when I was a kid and thought about being a writer then. But I didn't have the confidence or belief that I could earn a living that way, so I never took myself seriously.
I've produced more pilots than United Airlines, and they've all been disasters. Every audition I ever took in my life I lost.
