He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain - no matter what - after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.
If I had free time to go to Los Angeles to shoot a movie, I would rather spend it with my kids.
I auditioned for a solo in church and got it. I was about seven and I sang a song called, 'Jesus, I Heard You Had a Big House' and I remember people standing up at the end and me thinking, 'Oh, I think I'm going to like this.' That's how it all began. Sounds funny to say you got your start in church, but I did.
Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.
She was scrubbing furiously at a line of grease spots which led from the stove towards the door to the dining-room. That was where Henry had held the platter tilted as he carried the steak in yesterday. And yet if she had warned him once about that, she had a thousand times!
I had my Olympic gold medal cut up into eleven pieces. Gave all eleven of my kids a piece. It'll come together again when they put me down.
The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn't have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn't get as far as Hoboken at that time.
I think it's perhaps fair to say we've been one of the most influential Royal Commissions this country ever had and there's nothing we have said that isn't relevant to the present situation.
When I finished Westlife, we had - Louie Walsh is still managing me - I was lucky to have options from different labels such as Sony and Universal. When we met Capitol and Nick Raphael, I just believed in them the most, and it looked like they believed in me the most.
For Closer, we've had five weeks. You go into every single word because it's very, very concentrated dialogue.
It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.
I was never on the side of the teachers at school. Even though I put all the work into getting the main role in the end-of-year musical when I was 11, they didn't give it me, even though they knew I should have had it. That sort of drove me into am dram and getting the main part in another production. And I did.
I love my hair. When I was young it had weird kinks and cowlicks in it, but I just grew into it. You grow into a lot of things.
I was on the verge of taking over a company myself, from my father, before I left Knoxville to become an actor. I was also a company commander in Korea, so I had some sense of how powerful authority can be. How dangerous it can be.
There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
I've always been very aware of balance and, even before I had a child, my life always takes priority to my work.
Very little changed fundamentally, except that the proud German soldier had turned into a defeated bundle of misery and the great German army had disintegrated.
I once knew a chap who had a system of just hanging the baby on the clothes line to dry and he was greatly admired by his fellow citizens for having discovered a wonderful innovation on changing a diaper.
No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.
I have good and bad days like everyone else. I just try to be positive and surround myself with great people. When I think about all the great things and people I have had in my life, that gives me confidence.
One of my grandsons used to insist, when he was only 3 or 4, that he had been born and had lived in India.
My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.
What I would say is I've only had one injury in my NBA career that was probably was because my core wasn't strong enough, when I had a stress fracture in my back.
When I was a student, I had a part time job as a barmaid at a dodgy pub in Kent.
My brain is - essentially, you take any college football player in the country, because I have had multiple, multiple concussions. I had 10 documented concussions, four post-concussion seizures and so, but, with that said, my brain is no worse than your average college football player's brain, right?
Hollywood didn't know if I was an actor or a nut or if I was this crazy character I was playing. I had developed an image of being a little bit unusual, different and wild.
Upon awakening in the morning, I wondered if the proceedings of the night before had been a dream. It was hard to believe that I was the world's heavyweight champion.
I was very good in math and physics. In the Soviet time, we had a lot of Olympic-style competitions for different disciplines: I was always winning in my region.
Life is too short to worry about anything. You had better enjoy it because the next day promises nothing.
I'd eat, eat, eat, not exercise, go to sleep, eat and eat. I looked up in the mirror and said I had to make a change if I was going to continue to live.
I've seen such things as you would not believe. I've seen motorbikes driven down hotel corridors - and had a go myself.
For the kind of thing that we were showing, the budget was sufficient. As we were speaking of in Haiti, we had not done that before in exactly this form and we had to have costumes for it.
My old firm, Goldman Sachs - traditionally, the best banks are leveraged 8:1. When we had the financial crisis in 2008, the investment banks were leveraged 35:1. Those rules had specifically been changed by a guy named Hank Paulson. He was secretary of Treasury.
I wanted to be the kind of woman who would attract a certain kind of man that I could respect. That was my thinking. It had to do with the kind of couple I would be a part of.
When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.
I had always been fascinated by the whole idea that Australia was this different ecology and that when rabbits and prickly pears and other things from Europe were introduced into Australia, they ran amok.
