I had people in my life who didn't give up on me: my mother, my aunt, my science teacher. I had one-on-one speech therapy. I had a nanny who spent all day playing turn-taking games with me.
I knew that my staying up would not change the election result if I were defeated, while if elected I had a hard day ahead of me. So I thought a night's rest was best in any event.
If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.
And it was under Wilson that the first great propaganda slogan was coined and emblazoned everywhere, to make Americans start thinking favorably of democracies and forget that we had a republic.
Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.
Don Chew is the owner of the Orange County Badminton Club, the location where I train. He played badminton when he was young and always had the passion for it. He never made it at the international level, but he wanted to give back to the sport. The majority of the elite players train at Orange County Badminton Club.
By 1968, I had lived 10 years in Michigan. Gradually, I had come to love watching Detroit's baseball club in its small, beautiful, antiquated Tiger Stadium - a baseball park as fine as Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, though it never got the adulatory press.
I'm not used to crying. It's a little difficult. All my life I've had to fight. It's just another fight I'm going to have to learn how to win, that's all. I'm just going to have to keep smiling.
If we had any nerve at all, if we had any real balls as a society, or whatever you need, whatever quality you need, real character, we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society, righteously.
The Republican majority, left to its own devices from 1995 to 2000, was a party committed to limited government and restoring the balances of federalism with the states. Clearly, President Bush has had a different vision, and that vision has resulted in education and welfare policies that have increased the size and scope of government.
I've never had plastic surgery, but if they made a new invention for making people taller, I'd be the first to have the surgery.
Growing up, if I had been given any advice - bad or good - I probably wouldn't have been able to act on it regardless. I wasn't shy, but I'd get nervous. I got a little more confident later in high school when I realized I could get girls to pay attention to me by making them laugh.
I've lost bags all over the world and had cases end up in London, Frankfurt, Los Angeles and Miami.
I kind of - I like my life; I feel I have lots of opportunities. And my parents actually having had such high expectations for me - I would say it's the greatest gift that anyone has ever given me. I complained a lot when I was little, but that's how I feel now. And that's why I tried to do the same with my two daughters.
I didn't know that people compared Bill Hicks and I but certainly I'm flattered if they do. I knew Bill a bit. We had dinner a couple of times and played guitar together once. I really tried to keep my distance from him professionally.
Other acting opportunities had come along, but nothing that was tantalizing enough to me to step away from what I found most interesting.
My father was my first inspiration. He had an incredible stereo and a turntable, and I was told not to touch it. But I'd go back and touch it anyway. I gained a respect for the turntables when I was a kid. When I was a teenager, I came up with a 'cueing system' to work the turntables because they didn't have it at that time.
And they were writing scripts where Christine had hit the glass ceiling. And I always thought Christine would never hit the glass ceiling. I thought her dreams would take her. Maybe her dreams wouldn't take her where she wanted, but she still had her dreams.
When I was elected governor of my state, I had a legislature 87 percent Democrat. It was not lost on me that to get anything done, I couldn't be attacking them. I had to find ways to reach out to them.
As a teenager I had no idea that I had the potential to win an Olympic gold medal and my athletic career developed only by lucky circumstances.
If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society.
I had just got married when I started writing my fourth novel. I'd come back from honeymoon, moved into our first house - a gorgeous little carriage house in London - and made my office on the third floor, overlooking the treetops in North West London.
Can you imagine that Cuba and Europe's youth, who had forgotten about traditional music, who only thought of rock music, are now looking back towards their grandparents? That is a phenomenon.
Although we didn't have much when I was growing up in Split, Croatia, my parents always tried to ensure that my sister and I had the things we needed, and it was enough for us.
I was 18 years old when I booked 'Youth in Revolt,' and it was my first movie, and I was starring in that movie - and even then, I didn't feel like I had made it.
I had my nose done when I was 16 years old, and I'll be honest: it did change my life.
I had to learn to jog because I run like a fish. All my friends found the thought of me running on screen hysterical because I do absolutely no exercise.
Roosevelt was the one who had the vision to change our policy from isolationism to world leadership. That was a terrific revolution. Our country's never been the same since.
My mother, who graduated from high school at sixteen, had no hope of affording college, so she went to work in the local post office for a dollar a day. She was doing better than her father, who earned ten cents an hour working at a nearby grain elevator.
I've never had a teammate competing with me my whole life.
You know some of the people in The Strokes, yeah, their parents had success - but we didn't live like yuppies.
When you had thugs and bullies and killers imposing their will on their own people or other people - if you don't respond to it, it just keeps coming because they're encouraged by their own success.
I think that Mama June has the greatest self-esteem on the planet. I always say to people, 'If I had her self-worth, I would probably be ruling the world.'
I think for a lot of people that had seen me do 'Snabba Cash', after watching 'The Killing,' I think they got a sense that I could do different kinds of characters.
I have had the occasion to meet child actors from the '60s and '70s at various functions, and everyone's gone on to various different lives - they're real-estate agents or surfers.
I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not and end up going extinct. We'd be the laughingstock of the aliens of the cosmos if that were the case.
