I felt more comfortable playing other people than being myself, when I was a kid. And then, the tables turned. Through my performances, I've become more comfortable with who I am, and then I just bring more of myself into the people that I play.
When I think about the stuff I've turned down or the stuff I wasn't interested in, I don't have any regrets. Yes, there were some movies that went on to be really popular. But now, how do they really fit into things?
I went to art school for fine art and then I started doing performance art, and then I started making fun of performance art, and it turned into comedy.
I feel so much more aware of who I am today as a woman since I turned 40.
When somebody turned me on to a Coltrane record around seventh grade, I took up saxophone.
I've made a dozen films in the English language. But then, for love, for my family and friends, I returned to Europe... I annoyingly - looking back - turned down films like 007, 'For Your Eyes Only,' written specially for me.
I turned 54 this year and I find myself feeling like I'm in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life - or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations.
The Shins is, in a way, a recording project that turned into a live band. So I don't really keep myself beholden to any rules when I'm in the studio for Shins. I just gotta get it done as best I can.
I just turned 40, and I look at so many performers and so many people who are actually always on time and always have an album out. They don't have actual lives, in my opinion. I feel like I'm so much more than being famous and meeting a musical quota. And I don't know, just the weight of the scrutiny and attention is too weird for me.
When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.
I want to look at life - at the commonplaces of existence - as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time.
Please don't make the mistake of thinking that 'Oryx and Crake' is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral.
When they put me in jail, that's when they turned me into an activist. Up until the time I went to jail, I was just a comedian.
Achingly funny as it was, Larry Gelbart's writing gave off sparks that turned a hard light on the way we are.
Yorkshire weather can turn quickly. At one Auld Lang Syne race, it dropped to -16C. The frost turned everybody's hair grey. I couldn't take my shoes off, as my laces had frozen solid.
I was told at first that being different was a bad thing. Everywhere I went, it was just, 'You're too different'... And it turned out that being different was the best thing that ever happened to my career. It is why people travel to my shows. It's why people want to hear my story and buy my book.
I once had an extraordinary experience with former prime minister Ted Heath. Both of his eyes, including the whites, turned jet black, and I seemed to be looking into two black holes.
I was sort of shocked when it all of a sudden turned out that I got all A's through college, with the exception of two B's in the first term. I never envisaged myself as summa cum laude.
Facts can be turned into art if one is artful enough.
There was a guy by the name of Charles Schwab: actually, Charles M. Schwab. I read a lot about him, and I always hoped I was related, but I wasn't. He was a steel magnate. He worked for J.P. Morgan; then he started Bethlehem Steel. But he had no children, unfortunately, and it turned out I wasn't a relative.
I'm a keen musician. Me and my mates have a great times jamming and recording stuff. We have a great band behind us and have turned my nursery-rhyme songs into quite credible pieces of music.
When I decided to become vegetarian, I had to learn how to 'recook,' if you will. For example, I used to put red wine in a big pot with the meat that I'd cooked in fat, and it was, of course, delicious. When I gave up meat, I wondered what I would make. That turned out to be vegetables, really organic and fresh.
I am one of those people who is not very patient in the makeup chair. I have been offered movies like 'Planet of the Apes' and stuff like 'The Grinch Who Stole Christmas' and I turned them down.
I'm not really a zombie genre guy; I'm not particularly versed in it. Doing 'The Walking Dead' sort of turned me on to the whole thing.
The whole thing for me is that I did 'Full House' and 'America's Funniest Home Videos,' and I look like a dentist, and I'm a dad. Being known as a dirty comedian turned into this weird thing. It's people's image of me.
I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.
'Love Tattoo' I recorded without a record company. I'd gotten turned down by the record companies - they said they didn't get me, which is fine, I suppose.
I turned down 'Forrest Gump.'
I turned 40, got married, got a kid, and my mother passed away. I experienced life and death, with the enjoyment of creating life and the loss, within one year.
I was just a kid in 1987 when I heard of the Pixies, the year after I graduated high school. But I had my band together, and my best friend at the time, Corey Hickock, who was the guitar player in the band that would become STP, Mighty Joe Young, turned me on to the Pixies.
For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.
My people are mostly underweight or overweight - however it is they turned out, like good bread. Bring back the hunched-over people... Bring back humanity.
I feel like there's no subject that can't be sung about. I wrote a song dedicated to people with inflammatory bowel disease, and then I wrote about shoes. And mangoes. Every rock should be turned.
I inhaled books. I loved Classics Illustrated comic books. These were books that I could afford to buy after I turned in pop bottles for change. 'The Prince and the Pauper,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'A Journey to the Center of the Earth.' Male narratives filled with adventure and self-discovery.
I had this moment in church, which I think really turned me off. I was 7 or 8 years old and I was sitting at church, and we happened to be playing with the sunlight that was coming down from the stained glass window, and the monsignor came down to the pew and grabbed us by our neck collars and said, 'I'll deal with you.'
I turned 30, and everyone told me I would feel different, and I didn't.
