I've just had some of the worst situations with the most beautiful girls who I just could not stand talking to anymore. The physical only lasts for so long.
Not too many people know it, but when I was in junior high, I was a pretty tough kid and was the leader of a street gang. Well, OK, it was less a street gang than an Ecology Club. We were pretty intimidating, though, and had our own meeting room until we got run out of there by a bunch of thugs from the Poetry Society.
A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.
When I was going away to school, I had a friend who took a liking to my family just a little too much. We couldn't get her out of the house. It took me saying to my parents, 'I don't want her here. I'm feeling replaced.'
I would kiss you, had I the courage.
As I've grown - dare I say it - older, I had hopes of indulging my dreams of being a sailor.
The problem with being married to an athlete who is, like, 19 feet tall and can just eat, like, 17 burgers at 11 o'clock at night is, you're like, 'I'll have just three of those burgers,' and you think you're being good because he had 19 and you had three!
Every White House has had its intellectuals, but very few presidents have been intellectuals themselves - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, the list more or less stops there.
I've never liked my smile, you see. I should have had braces as a kid, but I was too proud and too vain. And I didn't want to be bullied at school.
It used to be that people had a way of dealing with the world that was basically, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call.' Now I would capture a way of dealing with the world, which is: 'I want to have a feeling, I need to send a text.'
I think people should be protected from being made to feel that they want to know what somebody famous had for breakfast.
I grew up as a Mormon, and that had more of an impact on my values than my beliefs. I'm afraid I will always feel the weight of a lie. I'm very hard on myself anyway. Religious guilt carries over too. You can't really misbehave without feeling badly about it. At least, I can't.
The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
By the time 'Buffy' finished its Bay Area theatrical run - including a two-month stint at the dollar theater - I had seen the movie well over three dozen times. I was in love.
I've had some incredibly triumphal things happen in my life.
LL Cool J was a rapper-turned-actor, and I also relate to him because he was sort of a ladies' man and had a female fan base, but yet he's a positive dude. You never read about him getting into trouble or going to jail.
I guess my first professional experience was when my church choir director told my mother that I had a gift with my voice and said that I should think about auditioning, at 11 years old, for the chorus of our regional opera company.
To start your working life after you've graduated from school and university, it takes you a long time to get started in the real world. Today, kids are not out into the workforce until 27 or 30 years of age. By the time I was 30, I had six kids and 60 trucks.
Thank God I've never had the sort of intense fame that means you can't walk up the road. That sort of blazing stardom must be difficult to cope with and maintain; my career has just bubbled along happily.
It became clear to me that I had to push it toward a more representational way of drawing.
We've had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we've had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it's all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West.
The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and, by the 1840s, held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a 'magnetic fluid' that could become imbalanced, causing illness.
We were always in church, and always singing, so once I realized that music was something that I had a knack for, I sort of latched onto it, and it helped give me an identity and figure out who I was as a person. It informed my way into theater, which informed my way into television.
No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson's. There's no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.
There is no living African writer who has not had to, or will not have to, contend with Achebe's work. We are either resisting him - stylistically, politically, or culturally - or we are writing toward him.
I'm Jewish. I've always had a thing where it's okay to dance with the devil, just don't become the devil. Even at my peak, I never went too over the top.
Without really trying to, I've become a sort of jailhouse lawyer of relationships - someone who's had to do so much work on her own case that I can now help you with yours.
I was a very bad journalist. Awful. I would just invent everything. If I did an interview, I had a preconception of what that person should say and I would put my words in his mouth.
The most outrageous shoe that I had to do was a shoe where the person gave me stones - precious stones - and say that I could do anything with precious stones.
We had four guys in the family, so somebody was always hitting somebody or chasing somebody or getting mad or fighting or wrestling - that was just what you did. So when you're the youngest, it's good for you. You figure out real early how to get out of headlocks and holds.
I just had a crazy, wild imagination all my life, and science fiction is the greatest outlet for me.
The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.
When I was a kid, I had a period in my life when I was eight or nine when I was so scared of dying that I wouldn't go out of our house for a whole year. I refused to step out of the door because I thought something would happen. I had all these compulsive thoughts or whatever, and my head was really messed up.
Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems.
My 40th birthday I held in an old-age home. My 50th I had at Pravda before it opened in New York. My 60th I had at Pastis. For my 70th, I thought, 'I don't need to have a celebrity party this year. I'm going to go take my oldest, closest friends to Paris.'
I had an audition where Josh Brolin was pelting me with his personality. I didn't get the part.
