There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.
I'd fallen in love with a woman but she broke up with me and I was devastated. Six months later, I went into a suicidal depression from the break-up of the relationship, but I resolved to not do what my friends had done. And so I reached out for help.
My father had a series of blue-collar jobs and never made more than $20,000 a year. When I was seven, he got injured on a job. That was a very important point - because of the injury, he couldn't walk, and the company he was working for did not pay him. There was no compensation. So there was no money and no food.
My strangest media moment a photo session they all had dressed up like 50 gangsters. That was pretty cool. We have to get some more of those kind of photos sometimes.
There's a bit of a reluctance on my part to promote myself as any kind of hero because the things I've had to overcome in my life are not the deepest, darkest things.
I feel like my entire career and life, I've been judged by people who did not really know me. I definitely think that they probably were right to assume what they had assumed about me, because there was such little to go on out there.
What's been nice is that I've been able to direct from a very idealistic place. I've never had to make my living as a director, which gave me a chance to choose material I feel passionate about. The directing allows me to not have to grab any acting role that comes along. I can pick and choose a little bit.
In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.
'Jump Street,' I knew we had a great time. It didn't matter, didn't know if it was going to do well.
When I had the idea for 'Shopaholic', it was as though a light switched on. I realised I actually wanted to write comedy. No apologies, no trying to be serious, just full-on entertainment. The minute I went with that and threw myself into it, it felt just like writing my first book again - it was really liberating.
I did the first study because I had been exposed to something that I took to be important and interesting - this thought reform process - in the military.
My thinking about plastic surgery is this. I haven't had it, but never say never. Because when you do, you are definitely going to go there.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
When I had cancer - of the colon first, followed by breast cancer and a mastectomy - my motto used to be 'Drips by day, Prada by night.' I felt that I had to grasp it in the same way as you'd take on any challenge.
I had the notion that, OK, so now we have all of this wealth, we could buy not only one expensive car, we could buy all of them. As soon as you realize that you could buy all of them, then none of them are particularly interesting or satisfying.
If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.
I am aware that my name has been connected with all the bank robberies in the country; but positively I had nothing to do with any one of them. I look upon my life since the war as a blank, and will never say anything to make it appear otherwise.
When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options: nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her.
Unfortunately we don't have all the bits and pieces on the car that we had hoped to have by this stage so we've got to make as good a job as we can with what we have and we feel we are doing well with that at the moment.
Before Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, there was the same sort of talk of young men sacrificing their lives so that a country might grow - that somehow it had been a great nation-building success for Newfoundland.
My friends seem to think that an hour and a half effort a day is all they need to bring to the altar to make things work for them. I couldn't do that. I thought that if you didn't work at least as hard as the guy who runs a gas station, then you had no right to hope for achievement. You certainly had to work all day, every day.
To become a villain, you had to have become disillusioned, and in order to become disillusioned you had to have been passionate about something you believed in that was shaken and ripped from your grasp as a protagonist in that stage of your life, leaving you disillusioned with God, if you will.
I came along and was a teenager in the Depression, and nobody had jobs. So I went out hitchhiking, when I met a man named Woody Guthrie. He was the single biggest part of my education.
When I said I didn't have a cent, I didn't. I used to get annoyed with people who said they were broke when they had five dollars.
If I'd had some set idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?
Whenever somebody comes up with a good idea, there's somebody else who has never had a good idea in his life who stands up and says, Oh, you can't do that.
I knew that my hair was falling out and I had really weird skin. My face looked really weird and I was getting this fuzz on my face and I was always cold - always to the point of uncontrollably shaking. I was more scared that 85 lbs. wasn't good enough. I wanted to be lower.
I like vampires, tuberculosis, anything to do with blood. Then I read a biography of Rasputin and found out he'd had this daughter who had become a famous lion tamer and been billed as the daughter of the mad monk who was able to hypnotize animals with her eyes. It gave me a vision.
Everybody's saying, you know, 'You're so heroic and so on despite of the polio that you had and so on.' Look, I had polio when I was four. So when you're four years old, you know, you get used to things very, very quickly.
I was lucky, I had support from Mum and Dad - they said as long as you work hard, anything is possible. I never thought past those two things - that I liked living in imaginary worlds and that it is possible to do that for a living.
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
Had the United States not acted in Iraq, Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi would likely not have declared his weapons programs, submitted to international inspections and voluntarily dismantled its programs.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
The best working experiences I've had are with directors who want to create with you while you're on set. I prefer a much freer environment. That's why I'm always trying to mess things up, just to know that I can!
A friend in the War Office warned me that I was in Kitchener's black books, and that orders had been given for my arrest next time I appeared in France.
I think what made John Lennon so exciting as an artist is that, like Dylan and other musicians with a truly important musical legacy, he had several faces, personas that changed over time as he developed.
