I do think New York prepares you for the crossection of personalities and realities on display when you leave the country, and I'd live somewhere else if I had a reason or burning-the-the-point-of-discomfort desire to do so.
I love the '60s and sort of wish all design had stopped in 1967. That would be my dream. They were really just nailing it - everyone looked great - but then it started getting a bit slippery after that.
I chose John Carroll Lynch as my SAG name when I was 19 years old. I was working in D.C., and I got my SAG card by doing a first aid film for the Red Cross called 'Bleeding Control'. They had a union contract.
My predecessor, P. W. Botha, had an inner circle, and I did not like it. I preferred decisions to evolve out of cabinet discussions. That way, we achieved real co-ownership of our policies.
We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King's success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.
I've written since I was 10 years old, so I guess I'm self-taught. I've had some luck along the way, I must admit, and I've worked hard.
Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.
I've had rough first trimesters. But once you get into the second, it's fine after that.
I tried the guitar, but it had two strings too many. It was just too complicated, man! Plus, I grew up with Steve Cropper. There were so many good guitar players, another one wasn't needed. What was needed was a bass.
I've had to come to grips with a God that fits my own experience, which is, my God could not be offering protection and not have protected my boy.
I wrote an ITV drama in the 1960s, a satire on management theory that starred Leonard Rossiter. I'm also a poet and have had work in the 'Spectator.'
'Birdman' has kinda... changed things. I'm not saying you won't see traditionally made movies any more. But I've had meetings with directors, and they've said it makes them rethink everything. You can hate this movie, but you have to talk about it. It's going to go down as one of the most interesting movies ever made.
I just felt like there was a world of cartoon voices that had to be discovered by me.
I've had journalists asking me, 'What do we call you - is it handicapped, are you disabled, physically challenged?' I said, 'Well hopefully you could just call me Aimee. But if you have to describe it, I'm a bilateral below-the-knee amputee.'
I had been coming to New York, pretty much once a month, to dance on Broadway. I was offered a huge Broadway show but couldn't do it because my brother was having his huge Bar Mitzvah.
You know in 1982, the year we came in tied for 3rd, we probably had a better team - I mean as far as talent. When we came back the following year and won it, our pitching staff was a little more experienced and it was such a thrill.
I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.
I write in the morning from about eight till noon, and sometimes again a bit in the afternoon. In the morning I start off by going over what I had done the previous day, which my wife has happily typed up for me.
'Catch-22' was a huge failure, and it rubbed off on everybody connected to it. I had a bunch of lean years where I had to do things, a lot of which I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about.
I did a lot of commercials early on, and I remember the first commercial I ever got was for a product called Funyuns. I had to eat these chips for, like, 12 hours straight.
When I was younger, my mum used to put fresh flowers in bath water instead of rubber ducks, and since then I had a love of perfumes.
Film was something that I didn't see as a step up from music videos, though obviously, music videos, the fact that you work with a crew and a film camera, are the closest to film I've ever been. That is the only schooling I've ever had.
I made a very concerted decision to go to drama school in the United States. But I did have the opportunity to go to Britain's Central School of Speech and Drama, and my dad and I had a few tense words about that. He wanted me to go to British drama school.
I've been writing all my life, and playing bass came later on, when I was about 26. What I recognized with poetry and music that I had a different voice - there were things I wanted to express that I could not as an actor or even as a director. It was another avenue of expression that my soul needs.
Italy remained attached to conservatism. It had a political class that lived in the past and didn't build the future. The past is our strength, but it risks becoming our ruin if we walk with our heads turned backwards.
In France, if you have any sort of talent, you'd better keep it here. And if you're going to go abroad, it had better not be America. The old battle - American versus Frog cinema. It's ridiculous.
I'll say this: I'm not so sure 'The Jetsons' had it so wrong.
I think that, initially, I was most passionate about music and particularly about playing the piano. I started playing when I was nine, and I was obsessed with it, really. I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent to be able to play the piano professionally.
I think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn't read any 'how to' books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn't even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.
I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States' response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.
I went to a basic school, which had children from all corners of the world, and met my best friend and had to learn Greek because she didn't speak English.
My first semester of college, I'm going to sociology and English and psychology, and all I cared about was getting home and preparing for whatever audition I had.
Our Soviet espionage efforts had virtually never, or had very seldom, produced any worthwhile political or economic intelligence on the Soviet Union.
When I was playing before I retired, I never really understood the appreciation and the respect that people gave me. People had treated me like a god or something, and that was very embarrassing.
I was a dancer until I was 19. I never had to worry about working out or what I ate. So I've really had to train myself to get down to the gym.
When Bob Wilson left the BBC for ITV, I got the 'Football Focus' job, and it went from there. It came completely out of the blue, but the fact I had a high profile certainly helped.
