I had a hard time going back to school after T2. I really didn't want to go to private school.
I read 'The Hobbit' but not a single one of the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. I had to lie about this pretty much all through high school. I still say it apologetically.
New York City is crazy and beautiful and really close to my heart, and I've always had dear friends here - family, actually, I would say.
J.J. Abrams and I met, and we just had this incredible kind of vibe between us.
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
If Rosa Parks had not refused to move to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.
You know, my mother had a rule which was 'people are just people.'
'The Food Network' was just starting in New York, and I was getting lots of attention from Mesa Grill. They had no money, so if you couldn't get there by subway, you couldn't be on. It wasn't like TV was something I really wanted to do - but I knew it would be great publicity for my restaurants.
I always had a weight issue since I was a young kid.
I had been in a film, playing a young British aristocrat. My wife told me that she was invited to a dinner and she invited me to dinner and the hostess had seen me and said, 'You cannot bring him.' but I think that I've done enough to shatter the image.
I haven't had any problems with my back since I got the foot surgery.
The Pilgrim and the Puritan whom we honor tonight were men who did a great deal of work in the world. They had their faults and their - shortcomings, but they were not slothful in business and they were most fervent in spirit.
I may have managed to build a successful technology startup that had gone public by the time my three kids hit their 13th birthdays, but don't think that bought my wife and me any special respect from our teenagers.
We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.
It wasn't like it is now. But for the types of teams we had, the fans were very good here. On some Thursday afternoon games, we'd get 25,000 fans. That was remarkable. This has always been a great Red Sox city.
I had braces for six years! Kids would call me 'big teeth' or 'rabbit teeth.'
People are going to wake up to this great reservoir of music we've created in America - cakewalks, one-steps, boogie-woogie, country and western. I had a bit to do with one of those traditions.
On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.
The thing about drugs and sex is that you lose all your inhibitions. I've had sex in trains, planes, wine bars... and quite a few car parks!
During the Samuel Johnson days they had big men enjoying small talk; today we have small men enjoying big talk.
I have a lot of milestones that I'm proud of when it comes to music, 'Amerikkka's Most Wanted,' I'm extremely proud of that. Just because of what I had to go through to get that music produced, that album produced.
I read all these stories that I don't know anything about politics. But I must know something. I've had some good victories in Congress, and I've survived this town for four years.
And, actually it was interesting because I had done a lot of traveling in the United States and Canada and Mexico on my motorcycle; and I was really, it was the first time I had really gotten out of the Minnesota area to speak of.
The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations.
It wasn't until my last year of college, 1976, that I decided well, maybe he's right. Delbert had been pushing me since high school to put 100% into my music.
I was terrified of being on stage, and I had to work very hard at a craft to get past that.
When I did the first 'Matrix,' after it came out, I had a woman come up to me and just thank me for Trinity because she was an action writer. She said she was getting really good opportunities now.
I had to audition for the part of Jnior, and I wanted the role terribly because I knew it was a great character. This guy is a wonderful, funny, mean old guy.
But with 9/11, we found that people tended to come back to the networks and the people who had been our core viewers in the past came back and they have stayed with us.
In the beginning, I tried to be a more cosmopolitan writer, but I realized that I was a country boy, and I had to deal with things I knew about and where I came from.
I shared a dressing room with Pete Postlethwaite for 18 months, and he became a good friend. His discipline had an impact on me. You could have a laugh with him, but he was always on the ball when it came to work and very professional. Hopefully some of that rubbed off on me.
Latecomers to industrial development have had to catch up by finding ways of closing the gap.
General Grant had no fixed plan of campaign beyond the general idea to avoid the strong defensive line occupied by General Lee behind Mine Run, and find a way to draw him out to open battle.
In the last four years, I heard the same thing over and over again from people: 'We've had enough,' 'Our country is drifting,' 'We've lost our way.'
I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.
Strangely enough, when the Sugababes' 'Freak Like Me' went to number 1, which was built around my 'Are 'Friends' Electric' song, I had another song called 'Rip' go to number 1 in the Kerrang TV chart, so I was pulling new people in from very different areas of musical interest. That was quite an amazing week.
