I've had, you know, my leg chopped off.
I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.
If someone had told me when I was a kid I'd get an ovation from Frank Sinatra! One time, I did a song called 'I Am A Singer', but I rewrote the words for Frank. I was in tears and, when he got up, so was he.
I have never had personal debt and never will.
The decision to retire was quite an easy one for me because by that stage my knees were so badly gone. If I had been like Martina Navratilova and my body had let me I would have carried on playing a lot longer.
The saddest thing is that when I sat down to rehearse for the Pixies, I couldn't believe that I had given up something that I loved. Now I hold the drum at night and I want to go to bed with it.
In the White House, I had influence. At Breitbart, I had power.
Two of my grandfathers had been artists, lifelong oil painters, so I was exposed to art very young. I've always been interested in it, although I never pursued it as a career or even as an avocation.
I did a live late-night talk show called 'Creation Nation' with friends of mine. I had a sidekick and a band, and I wrote the whole thing. And it had the form of a late-night talk show, but we did it on stage because no one was giving me a TV show at the time.
I've had some wins. And been knocked down with defeats. Glimpsed views from the top of the mountain. And walked through the darkest of valleys. But through this entire ride called 'a life' - I've refused to give up.
I had first come to Berlin in 1990, on a search for someplace to live besides the United States.
Our favorite teams bring people together, keep family members close, bond people from different generations. Some of the happiest moments of my life involve something that happened with one of my teams. Some of the best relationships I ever had were with Boston athletes that I never even met.
As an adult, you think of yourself as being someone else when you're away from your family, but when you come back to your family, you suddenly find yourself back in the exact same role that you always had in your family as a child and as a teenager.
I knew I had to find my own way of teaching.
Out of nowhere, they made an interim belt and had Lee fight Ferguson. This is very odd for me; what went on there? You know. I don't know what went on there.
I am something of a ham. Yeah, I'd always been a writer. But in high school, I acted in plays. So it wasn't as if you had to drag the words out of my vocal chords.
I had a great tennis career. I have no regrets. But to find peace with yourself, and to finally be with your family - I'm probably the happiest guy in the world.
When I first thought about leaving the traditional route of a 9-to-5 career to pursue full-time YouTube, it was terrifying - not many people were doing it. The thought was I have to have money saved up, because this very likely might fail. From the start, I had to give it my all for it to work.
I had operations up until I was 18, then revision on my scars to put back my eyebrows. So I've had a lot of what is called plastic surgery. And I have huge, huge respect for what that is.
I don't think I had the aspiration to be a star growing up. I loved Madonna and Bette Midler, and I had my karaoke machine and would sing their songs.
Motorsport is very expensive. No one cares if you had a good season two years ago and then you have an injury. It is a very dodgy investment.
We came out of a very provincial city that was not very supportive of music, and we had to do our own thing and flyer everywhere.
We sang a lot of church music. We were very active Baptists. Supposedly, I started singing when I was being given a bath - at 14 months or something like that. My mother and dad both swore that was true, but I'm sure it wasn't very good... We always had the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Saturday afternoons.
I had to figure out how to survive in New York, and most of my time was occupied in getting an apartment and getting money. A lot of older jazz guys looked out for me and found me gigs and places to stay.
If you go back to the history of the 'Madden' game, I was probably on the cover of it half the time. So if I was to believe there was a curse, I would also have to believe I'd been cursed. And I've never had that feeling.
I have had an interest in art since childhood. I loved to draw as a child and still do.
There's a film I did called 'Front of the Class', about a teacher who had Tourette's. That was a beautiful blend of drama and comedy. There's some great moments of levity in the script.
The best advice I got really had nothing to do with singing; it came from my brother, who always told me to stick to my guns and to believe in myself. I think Duane saw my talents and believed in me long before I ever did, and that meant the world to me.
Being a Barrymore didn't help me, other than giving me a great sense of pride and a strange spiritual sense that I felt OK about having the passion to act. It made sense because my whole family had done it and it helped rationalise it for me.
I had between 20 and 40 songs for 'Detox,' and I just couldn't feel it. Usually, I can hear the sequence of an album as I'm going, but I wasn't able to do that. I wasn't feeling it in my gut.
I've been a novelist since 1995 and have had novels in and out of option, and watching that process just made me realize that I have to live by what I teach my students, because I teach screenwriting at Spellman.
The year my mom worked as a secretary at an apparel company in midtown, she would often come home in tears because she had mistakenly called her boss by another coworker's name. 'You know how it is,' my father said, 'they all look the same. It's not your mom's fault. There's just no telling them apart. Same high nose and deep-set eyes.'
But again, we, I think, over the years have set the example for a lot of nations that may not have had the same values, the same type of coming out of the same culture that we as Americans have and enjoy. But we can be an example, a role model for them.
In a universe that's an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.
But with the slow menace of a glacier, depression came on. No one had any measure of its progress; no one had any plan for stopping it. Everyone tried to get out of its way.
I was a rabid 'Seinfeld' fan. Then I did the show, and it ruined the show for me. Not that it ruined the quality of the show, but I had seen behind the curtain at Oz.
