The last few years have been my happiest. I'm happy in the years that most people are blue and sad and waiting to die. I don't feel that a bit. Smiling has a lot to do with it. You can just lift your spirits by smiling a little bit.
In 40-odd years in show business, some years I could do no wrong, and some years I could do nothing right. Show business. I owe it everything - it owes me nothing.
I was at a meeting two years ago in Beijing, and I passed a bunch of women who were marching in a protest. Their signs were probably saying something I wouldn't have agreed with at all. But I was so glad to see women marching. And it's happening all over the world.
Long ago, I did a five-and-a-half-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week talk show for four years, early on, in Los Angeles - local show. And when you are on that many hours with no script, you know, you get very comfortable, maybe overly comfortable with that small audience.
At MIT, I had the good fortune for seven years to teach network theory, which is basic to many disciplines, to one-third of the undergraduate student body. It was an experiment to see how high we could bring their level of understanding, and it exceeded all of my expectations.
One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment.
If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.
Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.
Before this country came on the scene, for thousands of years people did things the same way. Within 200 years of the advent of this nation, men were walking on the moon, and I want us to recognize this is the kind of people that we are. We're creative with a lot of ingenuity and a lot of energy.
The Director of the Laboratory, George Reynolds, was most supportive of my efforts to work independently. There followed for ten years a glorious time for research.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a religiously conservative group. They are a minority in Egypt. They are not a majority of the Egyptian people, but they have a lot of credibility because all the other liberal parties have been smothered for 30 years.
Thirty years ago dinner theatre used to be much more of a going concern than it is now.
With this in mind, for some twenty years I have set myself as my particular task the experimental investigation of the connexion between change in the structure and change in the spectra of chemical atoms.
I've been keeping diaries for 27 years.
I always looked up there, because I remember a time when the only things on the walls in Fenway were the Jimmy Fund sign and the retired numbers. Never in a million years did you think you'd ever be up there with those guys.
I got my first trumpet when I was six years old, from Al Hirt. My father was playing in Al Hirt's band at that time.
They were kind of like little Stephen King stories... but these go back many hundreds of years.
There are moments when I can't believe I'm as old as I am. But I feel better physically than I did 10 years ago. I don't think, Oh God, I'm missing something.
Too many people hold a very narrow view of what motivates us. They believe that the only way to get us moving is with the jab of a stick or the promise of a carrot. But if you look at over 50 years of research on motivation, or simply scrutinize your own behavior, it's pretty clear human beings are more complicated than that.
Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.
I'm always happy to be a part of history. When you're a part of history, you live forever. 'The T.A.M.I. Show' will live forever because now it's brand new. We did that 40-odd years ago, and people are really starting to see it now. I was a part of history when I recorded that show.
Working with Adrien Brody was like going to Julliard, but instead of four years, I went for four weeks. He was like the Albert Einstein of professors, it was just the best experience of my life. Adrien was the most influential mentor in my acting career thus far, and even after the movie he continues to mentor me.
It's a cruel, heartless world out there in commercial rock 'n' roll, and when you take as much time off as we did, eight years, booking agents don't know if you'll draw.
My father was in and out of jail throughout my childhood. He really wasn't in my life at all. Thankfully, I had two strong role models who guided me through those years.
So I was determined to use my last two years in college doing something I thought I would enjoy, which was acting. And it was probably because there was girls over in the drama school too, you know?
There is no change - I'm as deep or as shallow as I ever was. What's new is on-the-job experience. This is what you gain with years.
I lost my father was I 10 years old, and I always looked for a father. I missed my father very much.
The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.
I look forward to their convention and look forward to hearing the President talk about what he will do for the next four years. He hasn't done it up to this point.
I had opera training for three years, and I have three albums out. I also did a Broadway show. I'm an actor that sings, so it is in my blood. It is in my system.
One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.
Five years from now, 10 years from now, there's going to be a huge Islamic population in the world, they're going to be nationalistic, they're going to be religious, and they're going to be militant.
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
It is strange how often a heart must be broken before the years can make it wise.
Some people have been listening to the Beatles their whole lives; I didn't discover them until I was 18 years old.
I think when I was two years old in the sandbox. I think I formulated my basic philosophy there, and I haven't really had to alter it very much ever since.
