I've been on such a losing streak that if I had been around I would have taken General Custer and given points.
After I had written seventeen full-length mysteries, two volumes of mini-mysteries, a travel guide and some quiz books, not to mention a spin-off Roman Mystery Scrolls series, I thought it was time I moved to new historical pastures.
I'm from a council estate myself, and the biggest release we had as kids was football. That's where all the great players learn their trade - as kids having a kickabout.
I've had to deal with all different types of situations - positive and negative and extremes of both.
Another side to me is this very sexual being. When I look back on my life, it's always been there. It's been there since I was 10 years old, having the imagination that I had.
The thing you notice here after America is how refreshingly ordinary people look because they haven't had their chin wrapped around the back of their ears.
I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.
I've always believed that government tends to screw up whatever it touches, but Obama in particular seemed different. He understood tech issues that left the other candidates bewildered. Part of it may be his age. But whatever the reason, I had real hope that he could help lead us into a new century of technology leadership and growth.
I had written movie scores, television series, played with other people. Carl had done the same with Asia, with other bands, everything. We weren't about to entrust Greg automatically with a production credit.
Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.
Punk rock really came out of N.Y. as a philosophy before the groups were ever recorded. I had a kind-of intellectual interest in the idea of creating a new scene that could be a grassroots thing.
If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottage princes' palaces.
There's always a bittersweet kind of thing, but I feel like everything had to work out the way it is. Everything that had to happen, happened.
From the age of 12, I had an understanding that singing was something I loved to do more than anything, and I did say to myself, 'Why not?' But there were definitely some doubts along the way.
Even in junior high, I always knew I had a talent for music and I knew I could make money that way.
Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
Many models I knew had come from broken families. That makes a significant difference in the way you handle yourself and the choices you make.
I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.
I was always in the popular crowd, but I really had atrocious teeth. I was encouraged to 'do well in school, 'cause no one's going to marry you!'
In the past I've had a bad injury, and then struggled when I've got back because I've been unfit.
I had to wear that suit, so I put in my required time in the gym. But I'm not one of those actors who romanticizes his trials working out and brags that he can bench press a panda now.
We put out press releases to tell people what had happened to me and that I had a large weight gain but a lot of people still didn't know. The ones that didn't know were floored. That was a real humbling experience for me.
The drink? Yes, I've had tough times in my life, especially the last year, regarding my ex-wife, my kids, I nearly broke my neck, I was on death row with pneumonia.
I took group lessons at a rink near my home. We first had to learn how to stand up on the ice wearing skates. Eventually we learned to move forward, but soon found out that it was not that easy to stop! So that was our next important lesson.
I had never made any plans beyond basketball.
I had a strong conviction that there was something out there in the world that was wonderful.
I like Cronenberg's early work; his '80s films had all these weird, amorphous flesh objects in them.
If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.
I've had an unbelievable life. I've been very lucky. You do create your own luck too, you know? I never forget where I'm from. Whenever I pass a building site or see somebody digging a ditch, I always think, 'That's real work.'
I had never seen a perfect game or no-hitter thrown.
Almost without exception, the talented women I have known have believed they had less ability than they actually had. And almost without exception, the talented men I have known believed they had more.
I've had the opportunity to experience firsthand how tech companies can help people in their daily lives.
So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital. There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.
Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune, he had not the method of making a fortune.
I laugh at it now, but one time I had an agent tell me I would never work in TV if I didn't get a nose job. People tell you to change yourself to fit into the L.A. scene, but the advice usually doesn't make any sense. The next agent told me my nose was great!
