I was eight when he left office. Like, he had an awesome house, you know, and my cousins and I had awesome trips to Camp David and Washington. It was just all like a good time for me.
I think the superstar thing is completely arbitrary. It's all about who had a movie that did well one weekend. Then, if you have a movie that doesn't do well the next weekend, then, all of the sudden, you've fallen from whatever. So it doesn't really mean anything for me.
I had played the Virgin Mary in 'Jesus of Nazareth,' and I had done 'Juliet' at the age of 15. People said, 'Where do you go from playing Juliet and the Virgin Mary?' And I said, 'Mother Teresa of Calcutta.'
At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language.
My dad's Nigerian, and I remember going to Nigeria, and all of these kids and adults and everyone in-between knew who TuPac was. They had TuPac t-shirts, TuPac posters, TuPac cassettes... everyone knew TuPac, and sometimes that was the only English that they spoke, was TuPac lyrics.
You hear people saying, 'Oh I'm so tired, I've had enough of Cannes.' How can you have enough of Cannes? It's just the best place to be, like a fairytale.
My dad said, 'The thing that I was told that was really helpful was that I mustn't be afraid of the things I was afraid of when I was five years old'. The shock of his childhood had put him in this defensive crouch against the world, and he needed to know that he had a nice wife and kids and it wasn't the same any more.
For over ten years I always had, but I don't speak English.
It was kind of boring for me to have to eat. I would know that I had to, and I would.
I think people forget that to be on the A list you first had to go through the original graded Parliamentary Selection Board. I did that and then like everyone else had the further interviews to get onto the A list.
I had this notion of what I called a democratic way of looking around, that nothing was more important or less important.
When I was about 13 or 14, I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year's regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.
The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualised that it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.
The example afforded before the Great War by Germany - which, if only it had exercised forbearance for another five or ten years, would by now be unrivaled in Europe - suggests that the task facing us now is to build up our strength calmly and with circumspection.
I've had every advantage in the world, despite the 18 years of silence which were nobody's fault but mine.
If I could have had my baby sooner, I would have, simply to spend more years with him.
So I got a chance to meet a whole bunch of those old real, real rough but gentle men. They lived hard, but they lived good - in one sense, you know. But you had a lot of fun. Didn't make much money, but you had a lot of fun.
I did a cake for the 60th birthday of Elton John, for Britney Spears' 27th birthday and for the 'Circus' album she put out - the cake had circus themes. I prepared a cake for a surprise 82nd birthday event for the architect Frank Gehry; the cake was comprised of mini-replicas of his buildings.
It was so draining. Going to parties to rub elbows with so-and-so and act like it's no big deal, when really all I was doing was hoping I'd have the success they had.
There is a hangover from a defeat like Denmark - ask any player about when they've had a bad game, it's still in there somewhere in the back of your mind.
I can't say I've ever had a dream about space or that I ponder it all the time.
At Marshall Field in Chicago, I had them take a big bed into the menswear department, one with black sheets. I'd get in bed wearing a nightcap, and my fans would get in bed with me, one at a time, and I'd sign their memorabilia. And then I'd give them a free pint of Ben & Jerry's.
Well, the thing about my high school, which I loved, is that we had uniforms. But whenever we had a free dress day, it was prep-ville, with sweater vests and polo shirts and khakis and Dockers.
I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling.
At one point, I worked up a list of five requirements for a superhero: superpowers, a costume, a code name, a mission, and a milieu. If the character had three out of the five, they were a superhero. But that's just my definition.
Literature gives us a window into other people's experiences in other places, in other times, so I thought it would be really interesting to investigate how different people had written about motherhood, and childhood.
By 1865, all Southern women - the happily and regrettably single, the perpetually engaged, the wives and widows - had tired of the war. The Confederacy was shrinking, and the morale of its remaining men shrinking with it.
By December 2009, I had come to terms with my gender identity just as I was deployed to Iraq.
The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.
I had a great AP U.S. History teacher in Pittsburgh. We still exchange Christmas cards. She was the first teacher who said I was a good writer - and I'd never heard that before. And so I remember that, and I remember that level of loving the material and really loving writing about it.
Once I had my son, I stopped shopping in stores because it's not an easy process to try on clothes - and I'm not an impulsive buyer. I need to do the dance in front of the mirror, the whole nine yards.
I haven't had that good a time in ages. Since September 11, really. I just felt so happy, it was like the sun came out of the clouds for me. I love Italy.
I'm an Air force Brat and I've lived all over the world and this country and there were people in my community who were gay - nurses, hairdressers, designers - people who just had a different way about themselves.
I had a very unusual childhood in that I grew up on the Stanford campus and I never moved.
No, I won't ever write another 'Lily Bard.' I said everything I had to say about Lily.
