I have not had the chance to go out there and do myself justice in an Olympic marathon yet. I have not been able to get to an Olympic marathon injury-free yet.
I had these fangs because I had jaundice when I was a kid and I was put on so many antibiotics that my teeth rotted. They had to cut them out. So I never had milk teeth. That was tough, you know, being in school having photos taken while I was pretending I had teeth. It was hideous.
I was born full grown in the middle of a hurricane and an earthquake on 10 September 1954, 12.52 P.M. When I found out that I had missed lunch, I gave such a shout that the Earth stopped and spun backwards two days. That's why I celebrate my birthday on 8 September.
Mos Def is one of the most creative, intelligent human beings I've had the opportunity to work with. He is fun. The entire time, he would go in and out of different characters, just for the fun of it. Awesome energy.
I like to be completely exhausted when I go to bed, so if I worked out and I had a long day, that's enough for me. Then I get on the bed and oof! So nice.
My kids have a competitive drive I never had growing up.
'Mad Men' still lives in my life as the best job that I've ever had because I thought the character was genius. It was so well-written.
Each one of us had a little story to tell and each recording was based on that. Lou played all of the music but we both sort of kicked around some cords during the writing phase.
My policing was nothing but activism - it had to be.
I had no desire to be famous; I just wanted to make the greatest music ever made. I didn't want anyone to know who I was.
I dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.
If a portion of a redwood is rotting, the redwood will send roots into its own form and draw nutrients out of itself as it falls apart. If we had redwood-like biology, if we got a touch of gangrene in our arm, then we could just, you know, extract the nutrients and the moisture out of it until it fell off.
I had envisioned doing comedy since childhood. For sure.
I've always been rapping before I was making money off of it. Before I made a profit, I had always been rapping.
How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.
Letters had always defeated distance, but with the coming of e-mail, time seemed to be vanquished as well.
Actually, I would love to make a music video. Maybe it would finally put to rest those persistent rumours that have followed me throughout my career - particularly when I was on camera performing - that I had died.
I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it's a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death.
At 16, when I was at Henry M. Gunn High School, I had a crush on the English teacher, and my grades improved dramatically. This great school had only 400 students, mostly children of Stanford professors, and it was more usual to have classes under one of the oak trees dotted around the campus than in the classroom.
Oh man. If I had magic powers... I would hope that I would use them for good. I think I would. But I would do something pretty trivial like making traffic disappear.
The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
You had better have one King than five hundred.
Pioneer women were very tough - they had to be, because the men go off for long periods of time, and the women would have to be able to protect themselves and their homes.
My mother had a beautiful, soothing voice that made me melt.
There were the phone calls and Elvis had asked me to visit him in Los Angeles. This was in 1962.
My father is a very successful man in the corporate world, and I am his only son. He had certain dreams for me. I was scared to tell him that I wanted to be an actor.
I became very successful at a young age... I had lots of opportunities and lots of power and had no idea how to focus it.
The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that.
If there's anything in life you consider worthwhile achieving - go for it. I was told many times to forget show business - I had nothing going for me. But I pursued it, anyway. Voila!
My mother and I were on welfare and food stamps until I was 18, so I've always had this ethos of, like, 'try and make a little bit of money now because you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.'
Christmas Day itself hasn't always been great. My parents went abroad when I was very young, and I went to boarding school. We had a few Christmases before that - I remember a big sack of presents and Mummy cooking goose.
There has been treatment for hepatitis C, but the treatment has not been overwhelmingly effective, number 1. And number 2, it has had considerable toxicity.
In my mind, I never doubted whether I was going to achieve what I wanted to do. I just had to decide what it is I wanted to do.
If the British Isles had an official vegetable, it would have to be the potato.
A series of studies in the 1990s and 2000s revealed that as women gained more access to education, jobs, and birth control, they had fewer children. As a result, developed countries in western Europe, Japan, and the Americas were seeing zero or negative population growth.
You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.
