My father was an entrepreneur - a sign maker, and he had about 20 employees - and often he'd take me to business meetings, and I would listen to him talk with his workers and customers. We would also talk a lot about business over dinner.
I first read 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe' when I was a kid. And I think it was read to me. Me and my sister both had a copy and loved the books.
Before I left the 'Star' last year to write books full-time, I welcomed catastrophe. It was material. Missed planes, broken pipes, dead lawns, digestive disorders, you name it, if it was something that had gone horribly wrong, it was worth banging out 600 words about.
I always loved the Yorkshire members and was passionate about playing for the county, but the people who were running the club made it at times unbearable for me. The rulers had a history of doing what they wanted and sacking players seemingly on a whim.
If Pocahontas had been given the foresight to see what devastating consequences her actions and belief in the possibility of peace would have brought upon her people, I wonder if she would have avoided befriending the English or not.
My eye? It's a genetic thing. My dad had it, and now I have it. You know, I just found out that it may be correctable a little bit, because it does impair my vision. When I look up, I lose sight in this eye. I think, maybe for other people, it informs the way they see me.
'Minecraft' is to a large degree about having unique experiences that nobody else has had. The levels are randomly generated, and you can build anything you want to build yourself.
My father was a general manager with Hyatt, so we lived in the hotel so he would be close by if there were any problems. My mum was always adamant about us not abusing it. So I still had to clean my room. Housekeeping would never come and do it.
I have had every hair color. I joke with my hair colorist. She keeps sheets of paper on every hair color that I've had, so she has records of it all. She's done my hair since I was 15, and I guess I have a thick folder going because I've had so many different hair colors.
My mother had a marvelous talent for mishandling money - mine.
Frank Morley, who had worked in London at Faber and Faber, was the new head of Harcourt Brace, and he hired me to start in 1940. The early years at Harcourt were wonderful. Almost my first assignment was Virginia Woolf's novel 'Between the Acts.'
If you had known me in middle school, I was definitely not what someone would think of as Brad Pitt. That was not me. I was kind of a dork.
I grew up and lived in a Britain in which strikes and the threat of strikes had become part of the social fabric - and it was not very nice.
I always had pressure on myself through my life. I put pressure on myself and not from other people. I always wanted to be one of the hottest rappers. So the pressure comes from myself.
I became a better listener than I ever had been as a result of playing Jean Luc Picard because it was one of the things that he does terrifically well.
I've had an enormously privileged working life.
I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age.
I had so much fun working with Akshay, especially in the action scenes.
On one hand, I can say, you know, I had many family members - I had many people in my extended family who left right after Katrina, who relocated to different cities, right? Houston, Atlanta. Right? Most of them have come back.
I have had just an excess of energy. That's why I've always been active.
I just like really simple things. If I had been on tour for a while and I got to come back and take my girlfriend Eleanor on a date, we would go to the cinema and then out for dinner.
If someone told me I had to stop writing stories, that would be the end of me.
I had to relearn how to ride a horse like an ape. I had to change how I jumped off and how I gripped them with my thighs and distribute my weight differently.
Honestly, I have had to live like a high priestess in this show. It is a very, very lonely life. When you work the way I work - that means hard - there's no time for play.
I had a ukulele when I was about seven. Then I started playing around with the mandolin and the banjo.
Unsurprisingly, Nelson Mandela had and still has many detractors.
I remember, growing up, my mother had a work wardrobe. It was this very compartmentalized area of her closet. It was suits, but she would never wear those suits out on a date with my father!
After it became clear that I was not going to graduate, I had this moment where I was like, 'I need to not sulk. I need to pursue - at least try - to pursue music. But if I don't try, I'm going to be a really bitter middle-aged lady working in a cubicle.'
If you look at the top 100 players, you would see that the great majority of them have had at least a couple of surgeries. That tells me that we have to protect the players.
I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.
I'd been interested in animal behaviour as a teenager and had thought of studying it at one point.
I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood.
When I first started, there really was no beauty guru community. I didn't have the right production resources. I had to learn how to edit. I didn't even have beauty products. I had to go out and buy them myself because beauty brands didn't even know what a beauty guru was.
I think fundamentally, I had to make a decision really on whether this was a film about the past or the present. And 'The Act Of Killing' is a film about the present.
Pamphlets on Sabbath writing are in request here I have been applied to for them by several of the old Methodists knowing that I had them to sell before.
I have a great little camera, and I had a theory that if the story is interesting, it doesn't matter what medium you shoot it on. You just have to make a good film.
