The first time I had disposable income, the two things I cared most about were a television and a couch.
When I was a kid, I always had my hair in two plaits. But for dancing, I had to have it in a bun because I did ballet.
I like reading, I like boring things, and yet I think people for ages had this image of me that I was on the tube with a chainsaw looking for any likely candidate.
The think that we hung the film version all on was 'Hedwig' on tour. On stage, it's one theatre, one show. It just seemed natural to change it. In the film, we were able to go to flashback rather than have her talk to the audience. And we had the play to practice and to see where we had made mistakes.
I come from a really poor family, and when I started doing campaigns, it changed everything for my family. I am not complaining; I had a beautiful childhood - we didn't have a lot of money, but there was always food on the table, and my parents saved money so that in the holidays we would all get in the car and drive to the mountains.
I've had a love affair with the desert ever since I can remember. No matter what I wrote - contemporary romance, spy thriller, high fantasy - it was going to have a desert in it.
My dream job was to work in an ice cream shop. Two weeks and five pounds later, I realized it wasn't for me. For many years, I had planned to be a corporate lawyer. As luck would have it, other than a summer internship, I didn't end up doing that either.
I had an obsession with underarm shields - pointy ones, round ones, full ones, half ones.
When I was a kid, I had two great guilty pleasures. One was horror movies and the other was martial arts movies.
When I heard the Pogues, I connected with the songs immediately, but it was also the first time I didn't reject out of hand the kind of music that my parents had always tried to push on to us when we were growing up.
I did a lot of ridiculous television. Between 1980 and '85 I had no confidence, so I did everything I was told to do.
McCarthy had ten years in the House of Representatives, only two terms as a senator. What did he pass? Are there any bills or any piece of legislation that he's identified with? Not at all.
I wish I had the ability to crack wise, generally. You know, without getting punched. There's no way I could do it while getting beaten up. Definitely.
Well, I think I've had a fairly meandering career.
I had always done theater during the entire six years I was with 'CSI: Miami.'
It started to weigh on me that I was responsible for the moves that had made me successful, but I wasn't reaping the lion's share of the profits, and that was problematic for me.
I had a trainer during 'Spiderman,' and I discovered I have deep-seated rage when I'm holding heavy weights over my head. Whatever dormant anger I have in me, that's where it comes out. That's not the kind of working out I want to do.
When 'Red Tails' came along, all I knew was that they were the first African-American fighter pilots in the U.S. Air Force. I had no idea how deep the story went or about all their amazing achievements. There were a few Tuskegee Airmen on the set to make sure everything was as authentic as possible.
When Obamacare actually kicked in, just as we knew, if you liked your insurance, as I did - I had a health savings account - then I wasn't going to be able to keep it because it doesn't meet the requirements.
If you look at space companies, they've failed either because they've had a technical solution where success was not a possible outcome, they were unable to attract a critical mass of talent, or they just ran out of money. The finish line is usually a lot further away than you think.
I started writing poems on a Xanga page. I always loved writing. I also had a Deviant Art page, actually, because my crush had one, too.
I never once had a regular paycheck. Not for more than six weeks in a row and for the most part not even that. I still haven't. The notion of some whistling kid with a mail cart coming down the hall and handing me my weekly paycheck is something I've only seen in Matthew Broderick movies.
I had never heard much about Nashville before coming out here, and that's why it's so surprising, because I'm the biggest enthusiast on the city of Nashville now. I'm looking for a place out here to live.
Some of the best conversations I've had are sitting around a camp fire.
I realized that I had screwed up my life living different parts of my life in different places. I wasn't whole. I wasn't integrated. I wasn't a complete person. And after that, came out, spent some time at a psychiatric hospital.
Early on, I joined that large group of show business cadets who were 'multi-hyphenates,' 'independents,' 'self produced' or 'alternately financed.' Sometimes, most times, I've had to do it all: raise the money, write the script, produce, direct and act in the film.
Olympia was a town crawling with music. I was new to the whole punk scene. The culture shock continued; Olympia had bagels! We didn't have bagels in Arkansas. You could order vegetarian food all over town! It was so crazy to me - a place with so many vegetarians, the restaurants made special dishes for them?
Christopher Finazzo had a great job that paid him millions of dollars, but this honest living was apparently not enough to satisfy his greed.
The traditional way that society looks at healthcare is to let people get terribly sick and then have an emergency room to take care of them and spend a lot of money on acute care for people who would have been kept out of hospital in the first place if they had had a lifestyle change.
A friend of mine, Neil Gaiman, had the film rights to his book 'Stardust' bought by producer Matthew Vaughn and suggested I adapt it for the screen.
On my first day shooting '13 Going on 30,' Jennifer Garner had yellow tulips sent to my trailer. I'll never forget them.
When I was in the army, there were four times that I was wounded. I also got more than 30 wounds on my body, and my injuries were ranked on the second rank of invalids. The first rank is the most severe. So, that means that I had lost more than 60 per cent of working capability.
I absolutely love Ireland. It's one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and I have strong ties here. Both my grandmothers are from Ireland, and I have spent every summer in Bantry since my father, who is an artist, had the romantic idea 20 years ago to buy an old farmhouse on the west coast and renovate it.
I had been struggling with how to create a child-like protagonist's voice without making it sound as though I was 'dumbing down' to the character. They are able to see events, people and places with an intensity and open mindedness that adults lack.
A lot of preconceived notions that I had about fame and status and money and joy and pain, and all of these things that I thought I knew, I didn't.
When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.
