I began to speak well at a very advanced age - 15, 16, 17 years old. It was psychological: the trauma of war, my family and growing up on my own. I was more or less a street kid.
I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.
The hope in radio is to build an audience over a number of years, a slow build to see if something works.
I heard opera all day long. From the time I was 9 years old, I was imitating the singers; later I studied opera. But we also got Western television and radio, from the Americans in West Berlin. When I was 11 years old, I turned into a hippie and gave flowers to policemen. And when I was 21 and left Berlin for London, I became a punk.
There's a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can't do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played or would have played ten years earlier.
We have a lot of American TV in Australia. I grew up watching 'Seinfeld,' 'The Simpsons' and those prime time TV shows over the years that feature grown-ups and high school kids. We had a saturation of American voices.
In terms of my career, having the gold definitely changed my life. The Olympics are different, you know? They're every four years and it's such a small group.
Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also.
I'm the hardest working person I know. I'm 20 years old - is it a crime to want to go out dancing with my friends?
Poetry's always dead, you know? You don't realize how good poetry is until 15 years later.
For the last 12 years, I've felt really privileged to be living such a normal life. It's so a part of who I am.
I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.
I love to fly. I always wanted to fly. It's been one of my dreams since I was 3 years old. I remember saying to my mom, 3 years old, every day, 'I can fly!' Living on the ninth floor, it was dangerous.
I've run a lot of miles over the years, some fast and some not so fast. I've won some big races and I've had some big disappointments, but I enjoy the freedom of running and the challenge of training and competition as much now as when I first started back in high school.
It took us two years to get our first real gig. That was a big dream. We ended up booking a lot of our own gigs and putting on a lot of our own shows. We were trying to get our actual music across, trying to make a connection there.
Raising the traditional and early retirement ages will mean extending workers' taxable earning years, fueling economic growth and putting a dent in our unfunded-liabilities crisis by delaying payouts.
Then all of a sudden, Quentin Tarantino comes along and puts a song from 40 years ago in one of his films and they've suddenly discovered you. That was a real gift that Quentin gave me.
After 20 years in the game, I was fortunate to get away from the game and enjoy my family, which was great for me.
I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.
There is progress taking place, growth is better. We're only talking about two years there.
If you're going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling?
I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.
When I was a kid growing up, we had a cherry tree in the backyard, 100 years old. I climbed it, and it gave shade in the summertime and excellent cherries in the late summer. Having cherry blossoms around gives the best springtime vibe ever.
Years ago I met Richard Burton in Port Talbot, my home town, and afterwards he passed in his car with his wife, and I thought, 'I want to get out and become like him'. Not because of Wales, because I love Wales, but because I was so limited as a child at school and so bereft and lonely, and I thought becoming an actor would do that.
I created jobs. Russ Feingold, during that same approximate 30 years, what did he do? He built government. He built it larger and more intrusive.
What I've found over the years working on various projects is, you can have a clever book or clever tagline, but there has to be a story to go along with it that leads to something bigger. Something with a little more texture to it.
I've been involved with Carnegie Hall for the last 13 years, and Chairman for the last six. I feel really good about what we've done growing our educational programs there, building a board that has made Carnegie Hall really a world-class institution.
I put the copy of 'A Christmas Carol' that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the 'Christmas Spirits.' I plan to read it to my grandson.
I've learned after so many years in this business that nothing is set in stone until you're on set. I've been told I was the choice for years and never got hired. So I never go there in my mind.
I'm not a futurist.
Africa touches me. At night, there's this thought in your brain that a million years ago we started here.
I have had the pleasure of knowing Mitt Romney for several years now. There's so much to appreciate about him. He fixes things. He's results-driven. He's taken broken companies and made them successful.
You have a wine tasting of different years, and we're sort of doing that with our music, giving them a taste of what Journey used to be like.
I'm amazed that years after I stopped playing tennis, people still recognize me in restaurants and ask for my autograph.
Songs come from all over the place. You can't predict what you're going to like. You might like something that doesn't fit right now. What was working for you at one point, something you've loved for years and years, when you get together with everybody, you think, this doesn't match up with what's going on with you personally.
My ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline.
