I've never been a great enthusiast about how I look and I am very... when I was young I had a real anti-talent for inventing myself as unappealing - craven and unremarkable.
'The Quiet Ones' was my first film, let alone my first horror film, and I had so much fun. I had such a laugh, every single day. I look like such a feral child in it.
My greatest gift in life was being dyslexic. It made me special. It made me different. If I had not been dyslexic, I wouldn't have needed sports.
I had a lot of downs too, it is no secret.
Whenever I've had to make a major decision as a doctor, cop or for a company I've worked for, I ask myself: What is the value proposition here? Will my decision bring added value to the population I have the privilege to serve?
My mother was from Scotland and had very fair skin... she wouldn't allow us to go in the sun.
My father was one of the first Tae Kwon Do Masters to come to the states in the '60s. He had one of the first all-African-American fighting teams, and I was basically raised in a karate studio since I was 3. It's part of my blood, competing, and all that stuff was responsible for a lot of me just growing up.
In my day, the only people who achieved real independence were my father, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, who, with D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists. Other than that, everybody belonged to the big studios. They had no say in their own careers.
If I had to pick my greatest strength as a football coach, I say it would be innovation.
I remember finding 'Harold and Maude' strangely erotic. I've always had an octogenarian fetish.
After the global financial crisis of 2008, populist uprisings had sprouted across Europe. Putin and his strategists sensed the beginnings of a larger uprising that could upend the Continent and make life uncomfortable for his geostrategic competitors.
The IndyMac name had a lot of brand recognition - maybe for the wrong reasons, but there was recognition.
The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome.
When I was about 19, my stepmother said - because this was back in the '80s - that I had Robert Wagner's pompadour. I said, 'What are you talking about? You mean the guy from 'Hart to Hart?'
I could be making a lot more money now if I had chosen a different kind of movie, but none of that matters to me... I've done the parts I wanted to do.
It seemed like most of the memories faded before they had time to form. And after a while, my life with my father seemed like a familiar story or a distant dream.
If I had any real idea of exactly where inspiration comes from, I'd go there, find the foolish thing, bottle it, sell it, and retire to Tuscany.
I always wanted to find my voice and claim my tone, but I was doing it through the steps of being a TV writer. I had the executive producer title. I was running the room.
My parents paid me small amounts for cleaning my room or cleaning the dishes and stuff, but I never really had a real job before I started on my professional tennis career.
Doing 'Young Adult' was really reassuring to me in a lot of ways. It confirmed a lot of suspicions I had about great actors.
In the time it takes to heat a TV dinner, Clinton had convinced me that he was the smartest person in the room and that I was the center of his attention. In the next 25 years, I would see countless others fall just as quickly to the Clinton Touch.
I've had the fame and the joy of getting laughter - those are gifts.
Working on 'The Last Waltz' introduced me to Martin Scorsese, and I had been a movie bug since I was a young kid.
Up until the Depression, recession had a moral character: it was supposed to purge the body economic of the greed and excess that attends a business expansion.
I'd always had quite a privileged lifestyle, to be honest. I've never wanted for anything, but I do know the value of things. I'm not, like, a brat.
There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.
When I first came to New York I was a dancer, and a French record label offered me a recording contract and I had to go to Paris to do it. So I went there and that's how I really got into the music business. But I didn't like what I was doing when I got there, so I left, and I never did a record there.
If I had five minutes to live, I don't think I'd be bothered singing a song. I'd be dead, so it won't really matter. I'd have a glass of wine and a cigarette.
My years on 'SNL' had reconfirmed that what I do best is play for a sort of edgy comedy.
I promise you, every insurgent, freedom fighter, and stray gunman in Iraq who we arrested knew the ropes, knew that the way out was to announce he had been tortured by the Americans, ill treated, or prevented from reading the Koran or eating his breakfast or watching the television.
I've gotten into two fights since I've begun studying the martial arts, and each time, I was worried I'd kill the guy. One of my teachers always told me I had good power but bad control.
My mother is a huge fan of my work. I told her about 'Coraline' long before the film was made, and she got the book and read it. She reminded me that when I was about five years old, I used to sit in the kitchen for hours and talk about my 'other' family in Africa, my other mother and father. I had totally forgotten that.
I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles.
I worked at an ice cream parlor called Chadwicks. We wore old-timey outfits and had to bang a drum, play a kazoo, and sing 'Happy Birthday' to people while giving them free birthday sundaes. Lots of ice cream scooping and $1 tips.
I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.
House was the first film where I had no influence on the script. I had to buy the script with the game rights.
