In college, I went to school for acting; we had to learn phonetics just to be able to do dialects and all that stuff. I'm somebody who does better just hearing it. I'll just imitate it, and I get it better that way. When I know too much information, I'm not great.
I think every actor has their list of roles that were near misses. I've had my share. I was very close and almost cast in Philip Seymour Hoffman's 'Capote.'
I naively thought I had to go door to door, find somebody who could record me singing some songs. I didn't know Music Row, I didn't know anything! So after six or seven months, I went back home and went to college.
Believe me, I've totally blown any kind of so-called reputation I may have had. I really don't care. I think that's one of the joys of getting older; you just stop caring about things like that.
Well, the United States is a Pacific power. And we have always had a presence in the Pacific.
I was a pop-music junkie. My parents were into Frank Sinatra and Doris Day. They weren't too excited when I had Aretha or the Stones pumping.
I had never taken acting at Brown to be the beginnings of a career. I always did it just for fun.
I was very shy about acting. I thought you had to be confident. I was confident with my friends, but I would never think of acting in front of anyone else.
There were so many things in Baltimore not many people know about. I had struggles with my pitching coach. A lot of guys did.
I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.
The fact I had my father as an adversary was such a powerful tool to work with. I subconsciously fought him to the degree that I drove me to be one of the most successful musician in the world.
I tried to be really tough when I was younger. I felt I had to stand up for myself. I never felt like I fit in.
HootSuite never had a big launch. We were lucky to even have office space.
When the Greatest Hits came out and we did that tour, I just felt I wanted to take a break, totally. Probably because, as well, I was so young when I got famous. I did album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, then I had a public nervous breakdown where I just lost tons of weight.
When I did 'The Sound of Music' and 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Americanization of Emily,' all three were in the can and had not yet been released. So I was driving around having a fine time learning about how to make movies and enjoying myself enormously, and then they were released, and it was quite an assault, in a way.
I looked back at the years since I'd left college and thought of the list of things I'd have liked to do. I'd always wanted to write a book - not a small undertaking. I never felt I had the time or creative energy to spare in order to write one as well as I wanted.
Had my dad not been short and fat and balding, there's no doubt his career would have been very different. But he could do lots of stuff and made a very good career out of it. He had an incredible work ethic because he lost his father when he was very young, and the family had to pull together.
In publishing 'JFK: Reckless Youth' almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble myself with the Kennedys. Not because of my portrait of JFK - which was highly laudatory - but because I had described his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, in less-than-flattering terms.
'Ghost City' was actually one of the few instances of non-fiction that I had written, and I felt that I probably said what I wanted. I think it must be different for every author; I haven't done very much of it, and perhaps, in a way, I found it rather painful, which is why I don't really do it very often.
I'm so not a comic book guy. The most I knew about 'The Flash,' as a little kid, was the Underoos. I had 'The Flash' Underoos.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Thor. I had a hammer.
I've never dealt with the Russian government, I've never had a relationship with the Russian government.
For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.
Growing up, I've had plenty of obstacles, but to be honest, I didn't always have doubters. I was a standout athlete, so when that happens, you don't have too many people telling you 'You can't do this,' and 'You can't do that.' I've always been a bit of a people person and a hard worker.
When I was young I had so many inferiority complexes. I had an inferiority complex because I didn't go to university. I had an inferiority complex because I didn't train. Then it gets tiring. And you do get bored of it.
My bedroom was plastered with pictures of Van Damme. My mother was worried about me. Most teenage boys have half-naked women on their walls, and I had Jean-Claude.
I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.
Even if Koch Industries had a financial interest in the Keystone XL pipeline, what possibly could be wrong with that? Perhaps more important, under what circumstances would such an interest be worthy of a congressional inquisition?
I feel at various times in my life that I've been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity. The answer is always art.
I've had lots of things that didn't work out, like TV shows. You learn a lot through mistakes - I learned that you have to be the captain of your ship. Actually, I own my ship.
It was clear, for example, in 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.
I've owned a lot of dogs in my life - Marcela, Rusty, Petey Pup, Precious, Rosy and Ava. Each were in love with life's simple pleasures, but being people in dog suits, as they seem to be, they each had a defined personality!
I've been wearing lipstick since I was in 7th grade. That was our form of daring self-expression, because we had to wear uniforms in school. It made our teachers so angry.
I've gotten pretty good with a tray between acting jobs. In fact, when I got the TV show 'Gravity' I was still doing my catering work. I told my director I had to miss rehearsal because I had to work a party. He was like, 'You're on TV. You need to get over that.'
I did a weird thing when I was about 24. For four years I had written quite a lot of poetry, and I started reading through it and thought some of it was really good. So I burnt it all.
In 1990, Paul Smith and I decided that conducting polymers as materials had developed to a level of maturity that commercial products were possible. With this as a goal, we founded UNLAX Corporation.
