When I was 17 or 18 and it was time to figure out what to do with my life, I realized that I didn't enjoy anything as much as I enjoyed playing music. I felt that I had no choice: that I had to become a musician.
We've had a number 1 album in the UK and that was a really big thing for me. So now all we've got to do is do it in America and that will have the domino effect of doing it across the rest of the world.
In my late 20s, I realized that I had a very clear social conscience and strong opinions about things like diversity, equality, and education, and while I tried to become more politically literate, I just couldn't catch on. It felt like I had walked into a movie that had already started, and no one would explain what had happened.
A gentleman opposed to their enfranchisement once said to me, women have never produced anything of any value to the world. I told him the chief product of the women had been the men, and left it to him to decide whether the product was of any value.
Both times I was in India, I could not get people to listen to each other. I had to literally tell people to listen to each other and tell them that they can't get creative and find alternate solutions if they don't listen to each other. There's a lot of arguing and justifying.
I would have been an Egyptologist if I had had the schooling.
In terms of fashion, I think the biggest influence that I had was my father. My pops, he was really into men's fashion and read all of the magazines.
My parents had a great work ethic.
I didn't care about that because I'm not a diplomatic person to begin with. I just went along with things and did what I wanted to do because I knew they had to shoot their 12 pages a day. And when they realized that I didn't alter the text they really didn't mind what I did.
When I was younger, I had a much better connection between words and music. Somewhere along the way, I had kind of an aspiration to disconnect them, to just kind of go into a totally musical world.
I had a hard time when I came back to Sweden and started school, because I looked different. And we moved to a really small town on the west coast of Sweden, and there were no brown people around. It didn't really get any better until I started music school at about 10 years old.
I had older brothers and sisters who were high achievers, and I felt different, misunderstood by my family. That's not my family's fault; it was my perception.
Marty was an extraordinary person. Of all the boys I had dated, he was the only one who really cared that I had a brain. And he was always - well, making me feel that I was better than I thought I was.
Hippy people had a hopeful idea of what they wanted the world to be like, then most of them changed into corporate Yuppies. But I still have that hippy thing underneath somewhere.
I had been acting since I was seven years old, but I had a combination of things happen at about the same time. 'Austin Powers' came out on DVD, I got a series regular gig on 'Buffy' and 'Can't Hardly Wait' came out.
If my drug Ragaglitazar had been successful, we would have been getting royalties of thousands of crore rupees every year.
I was just a bumpkin. Just a country bumpkin. I had just come to New York from Virginia. Or was it Baltimore?
I've had tinnitus for about ten years, and since I started protecting my ears it hasn't got any worse - touch wood.
I did some research and tried to pull out some old, classic Van Halen that they had not played in 10 or 15 years. I think that was Sammy's mistake. I he didn't want to do the Dave stuff.
I've never really been a confident person, except from a musical standpoint. I had to push myself early on, but it got easier with each gig.
I imagined there would be a way to crack the diffraction barrier. But of course I didn't know exactly how it would work, but I had a gut feeling that there must be something, and so I tried to think about it, to be creative.
My grandmother though, began to prepare in her own neurotic - and I think psychotic - way to face racism. So she taught us to be racist, which is something I had to undo later when I got to Michigan, you know.
America had taken my father from me. And over most of the years of his illness, I gradually started feeling this support system from this country who-people grieving along with us.
When I was young, I could not imagine being old. My mother said, and the doctor confirmed, that I had an unusual amount of energy; and it followed me into young adulthood.
The British cinema had been very dull and conformist.
In high school, all my friends' older brothers had these cars. I had a number of friends whose brothers collected Dodges and Plymouths and some of the coolest cars I've ever seen when I was a kid. I was just flabbergasted.
I had a great time making the last movie, 'Eclipse.' We shot my back-story stuff from the 1930's. But I was waiting for 'Breaking Dawn' because I love the relationship Rosalie has with Jacob and the rest of her family and Bella. She also provides comic relief.
Patrick Swayze reminded me a lot of Gene Kelly. Patrick had that Everyman quality. Gene made dancing sort of an accessible idea for the regular guy out there.
I went to USC in L.A. Part of me is a real West Coast kid. My parents had a house in Palm Springs, which I now have. I spend a lot of time there.
When I got the money, the whole burden descended on me, and the realization of what I had done. And it led me then to make the further step, a change of loyalties.
My grandmother was the matriarch. I was the youngest of all the men in my family, so I kind of used them as examples and kind of emulated what I saw them do. So I didn't have to deal with a lot of bullying because we had a lot of back-up, so to speak.
Bono told me how to dance in high heels and he also told me about U2's Glastonbury performance and how everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong, including him ripping his trousers on stage. I think he was lunging and his trousers ripped! He was telling me how he had to find a new way of performing that didn't involve moving.
The very first day that Hillary came over, we were working on a song called 'All We'd Ever Need.' But we never even thought about it until we had written 5, 6, 7 songs. Then we played our first show, and we all enjoyed it so much. We felt like it was something a special and different. So from there we decided to do Lady Antebellum.
In the case of Elektra I really wasn't sure I could pull it off. There were so many intellectual leaps. My character, Stick, is blind, but he can see better than most people. So I had trouble kind of finding the logic.
Pacifist propaganda and the resolutions of the parliamentarians encouraged such treaties, and toward the end of the nineteenth century their number had increased considerably.
For every five well-adjusted and smoothly functioning Americans, there are two who never had the chance to discover themselves. It may well be because they have never been alone with themselves.
