Almost 50 years old now, some 30 years after graduation, I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world.
It's embarrassing, isn't it? It took me 15 years to make an 18-minute movie.
There are always some doubts when you do a new album though. You wonder whether you succeeded or not, especially when you waited as long as I did for this one - seven years. You're never really sure if it will be a nice record or not.
I had a blog for many years. Once you develop your readership on your blog, and you can put something out there or direct traffic or get attention - it's like a super power.
You know, one thing I've learned over 40 years is that when you have jobs in Washington, you do it day by day and that's what I'm doing as secretary of defense.
We went through ten years of the Limp Bizkit thing, and I didn't know what to do.
For those of us who have lost loved ones in their prime - as I did when my father and other relatives succumbed - even one of those years would have been a precious gift.
I don't understand the mentality of a rock fan, being obsessed with two or three songs from 25 years ago. I'm not that kind of a fan.
For a few years, I went down a path where I forgot to be in the moment and enjoy the moment.
For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel.
Virtual reality's been around for 40 years. People have been talking about storytelling in that world for all these years, and there have been experiments around of people trying to do that, and always excited about it.
You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.
And although I've been very fortunate in the film work that's come my way, I need to get back to the stage. If I'm away for a maximum of two years, I feel something's wrong.
It takes 300 years, it seems, for the great bands to get their due.
I have spent over 60 years bent over a guitar and to know that I wrote 70 compositions that masters have recorded, that makes me feel so good and full, and proud and thankful to the good Lord.
It's quite a feeling to finish something you have been 10 years beholden to and to have a clean slate.
I've been acting since I was 5 years old, from primary school to secondary school, did training at drama school, which was the big thing for me because they trained me, put me out into the industry.
For many years, I didn't feel I'd find anything that I'd like as much as 'Twin Peaks.'
Nothing matters more than your health. Healthy living is priceless. What millionaire wouldn't pay dearly for an extra 10 or 20 years of healthy aging?
Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.
President Obama is closing the prescription drug doughnut hole. He strengthened Medicare! He extended the life of the program by eight years. And what Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan won't admit is that their plan would require current seniors to pay, on average, $600 more each year for prescription drugs.
To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.
I don't think people really understood what I did. And you know, in my book, 'A Helluva High Note' deals with my back story, that I was a songwriter, that I spent years trying to hone my craft and being rejected and then finally becoming a successful songwriter, record executive and publisher.
Now, forty years after his passing, Winston Churchill is still quoted, read, revered, and referred to as much, if not more, than when he was alive.
Just because society, and government, and whatever was different 100 years ago, doesn't mean that people didn't have sex, pick their nose, or swear.
Well, the teacher I studied with for nineteen and a half years was a man named Paul Gavert. He was a great lieder singer, so basically I'm a trained lieder singer because of that teacher. The teacher I currently study with - since 1995 - is Joan Lader, who also studied with Gavert.
It is nothing new or original to say that golf is played one stroke at a time. But it took me many years to realize it.
We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
I took Jujitsu for four years, which has no striking.
My earnestness at the injustices I witnessed when I was writing 'Random Family' may have been my gravest reportorial offense during the early years of reporting. When I discuss the book with students, they often ask me how I could 'stand by' in the face of so much suffering; the egregiousness wasn't my powerlessness but my surprise.
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.
If you look over the years, the styles have changed - the clothes, the hair, the production, the approach to the songs. The icing to the cake has changed flavors. But if you really look at the cake itself, it's really the same.
We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now.
I've had many nicknames over the years: V, Nessa, Nessy Poo, Nessy Bear and Van. Only my parents call me Van, though, and I hate it. I get embarrassed.
Well, American dialects have been studied for a hundred years or so.
2011 is one of those years that historians are likely to look back on as a 'hinge.' And the truth, at once frightening and exhilarating, is that we don't know yet which way the door will swing.
