It is a great honor to be awarded a Nobel Prize. This is a wonderful experience for my wife Betty and me. We received congratulations by email, phone and post, many from old friends we had not seen for some time.
If you had your life to live over again, do it overseas.
There were two things going on: 1) I had already established in my own mind where I wanted to go with the next series, and having James around as a Grey Eminence would have complicated matters. He had had an amazing life and it was time to bid him good-bye.
Our oceans are facing innumerable threats - from overfishing and pollution to ocean acidification and invasive species - yet we haven't had a blueprint for its use and development, incredible as that seems.
I grew up near the University of Michigan, so we'd sneak into college parties. That's where my acting started - lying about the professors I supposedly had and what I was studying.
I'm very lucky. I had a great childhood.
I grew up in a house where nobody had to tell me to go to school every day and do my homework.
When you have a tough loss, go through it and agonize. I had one loss that I still want to change, but at the same time I realize it is an important part of who I am.
In radio I had one, maybe two people who cared about getting it done. I'd really be a loser if I forgot where I came from. So I show them the love. And how hard is it really to be interested in someone's life?
Hunter and I never got proper journalistic accreditation to go anywhere. Nobody was giving us passes to go in here or there. We always had to somehow talk our way in.
I wanted to be at my sister's funeral, but my family has always had a complicated dynamic.
Lucy Mercedes Martinez, my mother, was probably my first mentor. She really tried to take care of me in spite of myself, and in spite of her own struggles with alcohol. She was an immigrant who had never finished school. But she was also a Renaissance woman who read voraciously. She spoke several languages.
M*A*S*H offered real characters and everybody identified with them because they had such soul. The humor was intelligent and it always assumed that you had an intellect.
I think we just knew that we had a movie when Rachel walked in the room.
And for anyone who ever thought that Ellen and I broke it off because of sexuality, you couldn't be more mistaken. And for anyone who thought my mother's prayers had anything to do with me marrying a man, forget it.
I'm very hard on myself. Sometimes too hard on myself. When I lost in the Wimbledon finals, I was so sad, I cried. I had the runner-up trophy! It's still a great accomplishment, but I was so mad.
Every time I've failed, people had me out for the count, but I always come back.
I had rapidly become aware there were problems with the Kalifa group.
Not to this extent but from day one I had an awful lot of confidence when I got started.
It was not really a career choice that I had to make. It was something I knew right from the beginning. I had to be an actress... period.
The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.
I went to the doctor and he said I had acute appendicitis, and I said compared to who?
If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I've also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.
I had often wondered how to best decolonize my people... It must be done one human being at a time. Without that kind of help, Western society does not allow people to come to terms with their feelings. With honesty and therapy, my people can be made whole again.
Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.
I had used eclectic therapy and behavior therapy on myself at the age of 19 to get over my fear of public speaking and of approaching young women in public.
I've had opportunities before to run for office - the Republicans recruited me when I was surgeon general, to run for Congress, to run against Gov. Napolitano. But I didn't feel it was my calling... I felt, 'Well, I'm flattered, but I really would rather stay and be the doctor of the nation and stay as surgeon general.'
There are guys in the game only because of steroids. They couldn't make it with their natural talent, so they had to enhance themselves. It sucks.
We know darned well that in Bosnia, certain governments and the secretary had said tens of thousands are needed in Srebrenica and those people were never provided.
We had only snacks last time, I think it was OK for a day time menu. But this time it will be late night when people gather so we should add some proper meals.
As a young man you don't notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through.
The thing about my high school, which I loved, is that we had uniforms. But whenever we had a free dress day, it was prep-ville, with sweater vests and polo shirts and khakis and Dockers.
I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
When I first started acting I was about nine years old. I had never been to audition in my life and my agent sent me out. It was just a commercial for 'Harry Potter.' That was the first thing I ever went out for and I got the 'Harry Potter' commercial which was really cool, but I didn't play Harry Potter.
I definitely have found a balance. I've had so many offers in the past to do different movies or different things and I always choose tournaments over it.
I have had a very difficult time with stage fright; it undermines your well-being and peace of mind, and it can also threaten your livelihood.
