Growing up in the Sacramento Valley in the '70s, we were all pretty big into cars. Of course, I had to nerd out and be a fan of Bob Tullius' Group 44 Jaguars instead of Corvettes/Camaros.
I've certainly had a number of failures along the way, depending on my own instincts and creativity, some fairly celebrated, at least during their time.
I think it's hard for Aaliyah to be duplicated, because she had her own lane.
I came from a single parent household. And I had a bad example of what a husband and father could be and how irresponsible a father could be. So because of that, I didn't want to get married or have kids.
Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
I've had a fantastic career playing great parts. In many ways, the colour of my skin has been an asset because I've been asked to play certain roles as a result. I don't apologise for playing them anymore than Robert de Niro is sorry for playing American-Italians.
I had two ambitions: One was to be in The Actors Studio, and the other was to walk into a bar where actors hung out, and everyone would know that I was a professional actor and I would be accepted.
I wanted to drop three albums in a year because no one had done it. It was bold, unheard of.
Had acting not taken off, I would've been glad to become a teacher.
Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson hated each other so much. But that hate that they had for each other did not come before the love of their country.
I have no regrets. I had an amazing surrogate who carried my son for me. I am so grateful to her. I can even say I am grateful for having cancer. I was always meant to be a mom, but if I didn't have cancer, I never would have had Zev. I would have had a kid, but not Zev, and I want Zev - tantrums and all.
I couldn't do everything in the first or second day; it took me years to be able to get to the achievement that I've had. I wasn't perfect from the beginning.
I had this wild imagination. I was never me. All my childhood photos, I'm in fancy dress, playing a Russian refuge or Marvelous Mad Madam Mim.
I've had a relationship, a good relationship, with MTV for a long time, and I'd like to maintain that.
When I decided to be a musician I reckoned that that was going to be the way of less profit, less money. I was sort of giving up the idea of making a lot of money. It was what I loved to do. I would have done it anyway. If I'd had to work at Taco Bell I'd have still been out at night trying to play music.
Fortunately, I've always had self-belief.
I certainly did work at an amusement park. In 1985. Wow - I'm in denial about the year. I was in college, and I had no skills.
I really didn't want to be boxed into becoming a certain kind of film-maker - becoming the Maori story film-maker because I had made those short films.
I had decent but not great grades in high school because I was highly motivated in some subjects, like the arts, drama, English, and history, but in math and science I was a screw-up. Wooster saw something in me, and I really flourished there. I got into theatre, took photography and painting classes.
I divide my time between all the mud and open space in Surrey and the social life and work in London, particularly Chelsea, which still has the same village feel that it had in the swinging Sixties.
At one point I would read nothing that was not by the great American Jews - Saul Bellow, Philip Roth - which had a disastrous effect of making me think I needed to write the next great Jewish American novel. As a ginger-haired child in the West of Ireland, that didn't work out very well, as you can imagine.
'Game of Thrones' is a fantasy show not dedicated to any specific time, but it seems to exist in sort of a 1400s medieval fantasy world, and in that setting, I wouldn't have had a six-pack.
When the Internet came along, at first it was just a medium for moving text around - books first, then pictures, finally video. Each time the bandwidth expanded, so did the capabilities of the medium, and each time it happened, the Internet cannibalized preexisting formats. And each time, those formats had to adapt. Or die.
I returned to India after long years of international service, because I had always cherished the desire to make a difference in my own country.
I always managed to get in trouble, like every kid. But I had to learn a lot of hard lessons on my own, without parents who would nurture me and guard me through that part of life, at a very young age.
Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.
I wish I had a little more ambition. But then what would I do? Turn down more roles with more vehemence? Me no likey worky.
I had a low image of myself because I was brought up in the deep Depression.
I always had a dream to play for India but I never let it put pressure on me.
I'm from northern Virginia, but I grew up next to the West Virginia border, so it was hills and farmland. We had that sense of adventure you get from growing up around old farmhouses and lazy, rolling hills, you know?
The love and passion I had for the game was my key. I never had that taken out of me by my parents or a silly coach.
Public policy has been a passion of mine. For three decades, I've had some involvement in the political process.
When you look at the development of the American presidency, you see that the presidents who have had the greatest impact are the ones who fit their times most successfully.
When I was a kid, I had to try a lot of pyrotechnics just so people would know who I was.
Before the Internet, we were in a different sort of dark age. We had to wait to hear news on TV at night or in print the next day. We had to go to record stores to find new music. Cocktail party debates couldn't be settled on the spot.
I had a terrible manager once who described my career as 'spiraling downward.'
