I had seen 'Avenue Q' off-Broadway back in 2003 and fell in love with it. I just thought it was the smartest, funniest thing I'd seen in a long time.
From time to time, one imagined Bill Clinton had charisma, but it never really was more than an occasional false glare.
I got a part as a chorus girl in a show called Every Sailor and I had fun doing it. Mother didn't really approve of it, through.
What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.
At a certain point, I had to be like, 'I will not do any more auditions with a Middle Eastern accent.'
Africa is not fulfilling people's hopes and aspirations. African leaders have not had an agenda that included governing Africa so that people would find their careers, their life, dreams and visions fulfilled here.
If I had to put in order what I love to do the most, it would be musical theater, movies, and then television.
I have a self-defense mind. I've had it all my life.
My pitch count as a general rule was 135. And I knew how many pitches I had when I went to the mound for the last three innings.
I used to hunt as a child but gave up the chase in my 'Ho Ho Ho Chi-Minh, we shall fight and we shall win' chanting and marching days - by which time I had come to share Oscar Wilde's feelings about 'the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.'
If I had come out with an album called 'Brendon Urie Does...' everyone would have been like, 'Who?' Even five albums in, I'm still faceless wherever I go, which is great.
I would love to live in the wilds of nowhere, and when writing 'Chronicles,' I would occasionally rent a cottage in the middle of nowhere that had no mobile reception, but I'm not about to move away from my family.
If I ever had to be on an amusement park ride, I probably wouldn't get on one; I'm not a very adventurous person!
I work out like a maniac, three times more than anything I did in the past. I am off carbs, salt, sweets, and live on a fish diet. And I promise I am not going to indulge in food again. See, when I was 49 years old, I was fine, but the moment I touched 50, I felt that something within me had changed drastically. My metabolic rate dropped.
It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.
Obviously I was well aware that I had what people consider a privileged upbringing. My mom was never a bake-cookies sort of mom. I really had no reins whatsoever.
I was just lucky enough to grow up in a time when they actually had drama departments in schools.
I always had a long-term view of going into politics, so I suppose I was always careful. I mean, I got offered all these rinky dink tax deals, but I always paid my taxes. I am naturally quite conservative.
I have the highest regard for Aamirji, and when he asked me to be part of 'Dangal,' I was most happy. Unfortunately, I had to lose the match with Aamirji. This I couldn't do.
I'm not terribly well read. My wife forces books into my hands and insists I read them, which I'm grateful to her for. She made me read 'War and Peace.' The whole thing. It was amazing, but I had to hide it. You can't walk round reading 'War and Peace' - it's like you're in a comedy sketch and you think you're smart.
I think most people have creative ideas and have very strange, unorthodox impulses of things that they can do with their lives. I've had many of these over the years, but I decided the more important question was, 'When did I start calling this art?'
In the wake of 9/11, my wife Trish and I were stranded on the East Coast. We had planned a vacation to Greece, but flights had been halted. Instead, we ended up on a tiny island off the coast of Georgia.
There's something about Alan Arkin. Even when he's doing nothing, he makes me laugh. I've always had that reaction to him: he's got a weary world-view that makes him perfectly cast.
I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat but that's OK - the bat had to get Ozzy shots.
I was picked on because I was timid. I had younger sisters; I couldn't turn to them for help. I didn't have an older brother.
I almost drowned in a hot tub at a writing workshop once after I had some drinks without accounting for how the high elevation would impact my tolerance.
I was trying to figure out how to use the skills I had developed in the world of social change.
'Animal Kingdom' was an amalgam of two people that I had met-slash-known, not particularly well. They were both very, very scary people for very different reasons.
When I was young, I had no choice as to what I was eating.
Schubert had arguably the same melodic gift as Mozart, but even less support. He didn't have the early exposure, never got to travel anywhere, and yet generated and amassed a body of work that grew and developed and is very profound.
I had a band called the Sound Of Love, and that was R&B songs about girls in my high school. I played in some other indie bands who were trying to make it big; those sucked. Then I started Makeout Videotape, and that was that.
If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.
My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
It was difficult being a conscientious objector in the 1940's, but I felt I had to stick to my guns.
One of the more difficult tasks for me as president was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts... to my surprise... almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.
I became a soldier, not because I had a military vocation initially, but because it was the only way that that young, poor-class child from the provinces could go to the center of the country: through baseball, which was my dream.
