Boot Camp was great and very interesting. You got to use live rounds of ammunition and got to do a lot of crawling around with live rounds flying around you, so you really had to learn to keep your ass down - everything down for that matter.
Back when I was 15 or 16, in Dallas there was a department store called Sanger-Harris. One holiday season, I got a job as a gift wrapper there. The others were all experts who did that job every year, and I was by far the youngest person, who was totally inexperienced. In those days, department stores around Christmastime were a total frenzy.
Sometimes, I get so annoyed when other people brag. And sometimes, I know that I'm better than that or I've got something better in the works; I don't say anything. I just say, 'Really? That's great.'
I haven't always been confident. I actually suffered with low self-esteem growing up. Eventually, I got to a point where I was just like, 'OK, this is taking too much energy.' After that, I started accepting myself for who I was, and I was like, whoever is not going to accept it, they weren't really meant to be in my life in that way.
I've done well, I've been disappointed, and I think it all goes back to you. Of course the labels are going to be the labels. It's the music business. You are a business. That's what they do. So you've got to protect yourself.
I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way. My heroes were Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rembrandt. I think Picasso is about as a modern as I got. But I incorporated things that they rejected as well as movements that happened later.
We've got our football where no one wears anything and the guys are in little shorts and they beat the crap out of each other, and they can catch it and they can kick it, and it's the only place it's played in the world.
'The Critic' was so absurd, and I loved that. I loved working with Jon Lovitz, I think he's got a great, great voice for animation.
I went on the 'Outlander' Facebook page - this is when I kind of first got a sense of what people thought about Laoghaire, because I went on the 'Outlander' Facebook page and found this picture of myself, and there were all these comments, and a lot of them were great.
That's what music is to me. Like, stuff that I really like to play loud. And I've got my quiet CDs, too, that I listen to around the house, but if you can't go there, then... Everyone gets so upset with me, I can't win.
You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.
I think in running, to be honest, that even though athletes are very dedicated and are willing to train and do whatever they need to do to prepare, more often than not they're not in a very professional environment where you've got a high performance director and a coach that are really monitoring your daily activities.
You've got to learn to survive a defeat. That's when you develop character.
You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
One thing you have got to do politically is to identify the ties that bind society together and try to strengthen them.
Look at Jessica Simpson. She's famous for being dumb. I guess it started with Marylyn Monroe, and she actually wasn't that dumb, but that's how she was perceived - and that's what got popular.
The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat.
I don't go cheap on anything, but I'm not a shopper. If I want something, I look at it, decide what it is, but it will usually be the best product. I've got a pair of loafers that I still wear that I got in 1957.
My acting ability would have sent me back to the post office. It was my singing that got me jobs. Ironically, now, people think of me as an actor and don't know me much as a singer.
I actually got hurt in a steel factory in 1985 and so that changed my life. I went to a junior college and that's where I discovered acting.
I envy the people who say, 'oh, well, I've got my name in the golden book and I'm going to be entered into the pearly gates.'
My A&R at Epic got fired the first week I got signed.
I've got a lot of stamina and I enjoy people, so having lots of people around doesn't freak me out.
You can get some work, some jobs that will bore you until you're dead. So you better look for something that's got a little tingle to it.
You've got to get good habits of working hard so that when that play comes up during the regular season that you're able to complete it and do it the right way.
The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.
You know that big government doesn't hurt big corporations. They've got the best lawyers and accountants in the world. You know who gets destroyed by big government? It's the little guys.
The stuff we did under the name the Rentals got so chaotic.
Well, I got pretty good and went on the road with a group. We starved. At that time I didn't realize that you'd work one gig in Kansas City, the next in Florida and the next gig will be in Louisville. You know, a thousand miles a night. That was really rough, man.
I used a bike in London and that's it. I learnt a lot about biking, and really got into. Now I cycle regularly.
I will say that Edward Norton, who plays the scout master, would be a first-rate Eagle Scout. He's got all those techniques. If your plane crashes into the jungle somewhere, he would be the guy you would want to have with you.
I think President Obama is trying to deceive the public in pretending that he was not a part of Congress that has made some decisions in the past that got us to where we are today.
We got government off the backs of the people of India, particularly off the backs of India's entrepreneurs. We introduced more competition, both internal competition and external competition. We simplified and rationalized the tax system. We made risk-taking much more attractive.
I mean in recent years, I think you've only got to sell thirty or forty thousand to get a #1.
I learned some chords and I started watching anybody I could, once I really got into it.
For those of you who still believe in the Easter Bunny and that the letters that appear in your local newspaper come from concerned citizens who really care, I've got troubling news. At least in politics, most of the letters that get published on the letters-to-the-editor page originate in the campaign headquarters of the candidates.
