I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.
Playing live was always definitely a lot more fun. You picture it: working alone in the studio eight or 10 hours a day with nobody else there, being frustrated and driven crazy by all of the things that you have to deal with, vs. thousands of people screaming and singing along with you playing.
I spent a great deal of time with Che Guevara while I was in Havana. I believe he was far less a mercenary than he was a freedom fighter.
Life never works out the way you think it will. But you just have to deal with it.
All through college, I had frequently been the only girl in a science class - which wasn't such a bad deal.
I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very close, personal, loyal relationship. I'm not, as they say, a potted plant in these meetings.
I've always had a fascination with vampires. It's not that I'm exactly fascinated with the dark side. It's the human struggle with it. How we deal with those two aspects of who we are. We all have those elements.
I'm as old as I am, and I don't try to hide it. It's not a big deal.
There's the conventional wisdom, of which I have none, where you get a record deal, you get a publicist, you get a campaign, and you do the tour, but none of that adds up to things like nuance and subtlety and dynamic.
Fat Joe is signed to Fat Joe. I have a distribution deal for my label. I'm independent. I'm very happy with that.
Moreover, it thus follows that not a great deal of time was needed for the large animals of the three major parts of the world to become known to the people who spent time on the coasts of those regions.
For the most part, I have a very manageable celebrity. People recognize me from time to time, and they usually say very appreciative things. It affords me a great deal of pleasure.
I guess you deal with what you get.
Capitalism actually encourages morality because capitalism can't function well if people can't trust each other and people aren't honest, if a deal isn't a deal.
I never trust an executive who tends to pass the buck. Nor would I want to deal with him as a customer or a supplier.
'You're fired' was not a part of the deal. And when I went into the first board room, the very first one, I'm looking at these people, and I had to fire somebody, but we never thought in terms of the expression 'You're fired.'
I guess the first big name I worked with was Sissy Spacek, and that was really interesting just because she's so incredible and I learned so much from just watching her. But she's also so unassuming that I loved working with her. It wasn't like working with a star, it was Sissy. Not a big deal.
A great deal has been accomplished by the team, and I do think it important that it goes on and it is allowed to reach its full conclusion. In fact, I really believe it ought to be better resourced and totally focused on WMD; that that is important to do it.
But there are many, and I'm a supporter of a great deal of charities.
Because Ritchie Valens WAS the real deal. He was only starting, but in the time he spent in the business, he made big impact. I don't know if anybody could have made a bigger one.
I'm one of the few that comes from this vantage point: I never tried to get a record deal.
The press follow me. I sue them. That's the deal.
What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.
Modeling, for me, was not fulfilling. I didn't see the point - although I was able to travel a great deal. I lived in Italy, Germany, and Spain, but I wasn't devoted to it.
It's only in the United States that they make a big deal about nudity.
At 18, I got a publishing deal, so I was like, 'I can do this for real and not go to college.' When I was a teenager, my parents dragged me to a lot of songwriting conventions.
I went through life like an idiot for a great deal of the time, saying there's nothing I would change. That was a very arrogant thing to say. There's a lot I would change. There are people I would have steered clear of.
The trick in life is learning how to deal with it.
The best way to make a good deal is to have the ability to walk away from it.
I chose to deal with the science of cryptography. Cryptography began in mathematics. Codes were developed, even from Caesar's time, based on number theory and mathematical principles. I decided to use those principles and designed a work that is encoded.
I would be surprised if there weren't some owners who didn't want to get a deal done right now and get back to playing hockey.
Let's deal with each other honestly.
In Bollywood, we are told exactly what to do and how to do it and not to counter things by saying there's a better way. We make our actors feel important by paying them more. But the real deal is when you let the actors take some decisions on the sets.
There is a great deal of sympathy amongst workers for the Occupy Wall Street movement. We understand their frustration.
While many of my musicals deal with big themes and ideas, I don't intentionally go looking to write shows like that. A story will interest me, and then somewhere along the way, I discover that hidden inside are these epic themes.
We have to deal with the world as we find it. The world of what it takes to get this done.
