I wasn't a vegan when I came to Congress. It was a decision I made soon after I got here, and it's had such a positive impact on my life that I decided to try to help others as well.
All my life I wanted to be a bank robber. Carry a gun and wear a mask. Now that it's happened I guess I'm just about the best bank robber they ever had. And I sure am happy.
I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I do like to write about characters who aren't just starting out, who have had adventures before, who have had a past they aren't that happy looking back on.
Harvey Milk was a friend of mine, an important gay leader in San Francisco in the '70s, and he carried a really important message about how important it was to be visible, how important it was to come out, and that was the single most important thing we had to do.
This is the age of insincerity. The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them.
I still have in my memory, almost agonizing impressions of a serious illness which I had when I was about eight years old. Those about me called it scarlet fever, and its very name seemed to have a diabolical quality.
I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive.
We were rather poor, but we always had what we needed.
I'm really happy with Elektra, I don't have anything bad to say about them at all. I always knew a major label was the right place for me to be. I never really had an opportunity to go to an independent label anyway.
It didn't happen, but I feel fortunate for the two chances we had and it's just a shame we didn't go to a World Series for Cub fans.
I had played many gay characters before, but they were finite - guest characters in TV shows or characters in plays.
We had kind of a rocky start, but I spent a lot of time working with the President and handing him statistics and showing him what we were doing as we went along and kind of saying to him, you know, this is really important.
When I first started in the industry back home in Australia at 18, there was a lot of push and shove as to how I should dress, if I was allowed to cut my hair short, if I had too many tattoos. If I didn't get a campaign, or if I didn't get a role, they would always come back to, 'Well, she dresses like a boy.'
In the course of the reform, some new circumstances that we had not anticipated have appeared.
I was looking for something to make me happy, and once I realised what I actually had, then I found success.
Before playing football, I didn't fit in anywhere. My parents didn't have a lot of money, which they spent on our education to send us to Catholic private school in Oakland, mostly black. The other kids had more money than I did. I started school early; I was young. So I'd come back to my hood and read.
I would say to you that Americans of Hispanic descent want desperately to give their children the chances they never had.
My mother died when I was 12, and right after, my dad died in a car crash. I was 15 and had no family. The court sent me to live with my uncle and aunt in Missouri.
When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours.
When I sang that song, I felt it was almost as if some force had moved into my body. Things like that have only happened to me singing jazz. It doesn't happen when singing pop. I get so deeply into the music, it feels like I've become someone else.
When I made my way across childhood to the tinny AM radio, it was dark. Lights out. I listened intently. More intently than I ever had before. Something was speaking to my unformed-ness like a long lost friend. Something that I had never met but forgotten nonetheless. I was 'realizing' that music was 'different' from other things in life.
I had gone to the High School of the Performing Arts in New York City.
And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.
Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood.
It's about storytelling. The story is told through images. So with the cast, I had to make sure that the emotions were readable without sound... I know some great actors, if you turn off the sound, you don't really know what they're saying.
I have lifelong friends. My oldest friend, Herbie, has been a friend since I was 9. I've had bonds for over 50 years with people.
I did six internships, even though I was only allowed to do one. I had a paper with my advisor's signature on it that I would just forward for every new internship. I didn't get school credit, but I got away with giving free labor to everyone.
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
My mom is a huge woman of worth for me because she's been my idol my whole life. My mom was someone who juggled everything. She had her own career, she raised five kids, she was Superwoman... and she was never satisfied doing just one thing because... she probably just had too much energy.
My favorite pieces that I've written, either for St. Lucia or for myself, have always had a transporting quality to them, where they take you out of the moment and somewhere positive that feels nostalgic and happy but sad at the same time.
My mother took my brother and I to a production of 'The Tempest', and it was in this very small - it could have been the basement of a church or a black box. The space was vast, but there were maybe 15 seats in the middle. Ariel came out wearing a nude sparkly thong and spike heels, and the muses had these gossamer see-through gowns on.
We had maybe the greatest success of any company that I know of in Paris, and after two or three years I wanted to do this same number that we did for PBS, so we did it and Paris had always considered us their darlings.
Fashion is such a weird thing. Growing up, I just made do with whatever I had access to - a lot of hand-me-downs and thrift store shopping.
Getting older, I realize I've had a very fortunate life. I've had a budget that's allowed me to do just about any silly little thing the mind could conjure up, and I'm still alive and here.
I love cats. I've had cats as pets.
