My dad was working abroad, in Iraq, and he was a doctor. We used to go and visit him, in Baghdad, off and on. For the first ten years of my life, we used to go backwards and forwards to Baghdad, so that was quite amazing. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East.
I have been ambitious to be a somebody from the time I was 5 years old.
It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.
I feel like I've been very blessed to have some great mentors through the years, starting with Don James, who was my college coach, who really inspired me to want to be a coach, which is not something that I really had in mind.
Maybe these kids are just too young and too dumb to know about the first 13. Maybe they can't comprehend that the Braves have only won one World Series in those 13 years.
In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five years becoming the main character. I do that so by the time you get to the bottom of Page 2 or 3, you forget your name, where you live, your profession and the year it is. You become the main character of the book. You live the book.
Black History Month must be more than just a month of remembrance; it should be a tribute to our history and reminder of the work that lies in the months and years ahead.
I'm really connected to people, and my relationships with people are paramount, so I write about relationships, particularly strong female ones. In my family, there were six girls born in five years. We were best friends. And my parents raised all of us as first-class citizens.
And over the course of the last six years, as I've directed more features and commercials, I've become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.
I want to still be singing at 70 years old. I want to be open to the dreams I haven't even dreamed up.
They used to say I was a younger Winona Ryder and that always made me laugh because I'm three years older than she is.
In the last 100 years only Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford lost their bids for reelection. President Lyndon Johnson did not run for a second term.
The first few years I was in Vermont quite a bit, but I don't think I ever spent years and years there.
People who ask us when we will hold talks with Pakistan are perhaps not aware that over the last 55 years, every initiative for a dialogue with Pakistan has invariably come from India.
It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.
I think three-to-five years ahead minimum. I have a short-term plan, a five-year plan and a decade plan.
When I went to Philadelphia I was 26 years old and really sitting on top of the world. Family life, a professional career, plenty of friends and associates, and a good reputation, a wish list that could be the envy of many.
In our heads we're all about 33 years old.
For years, friends in Springfield, Missouri, have remarked on the physical resemblance between Brad Pitt and his only brother, Doug. But the two share a deeper similarity: their commitment to charitable causes.
I've really learned over the years how to control my adrenaline and let it all out when they shoot the gun versus letting the crowd and the lights and the camera get to me.
I think it is very ironic that most people think that the banjo is a southern white instrument. It came from Africa and even for the first years that white people played banjo they would put on blackface.
Charles was very intent to use his years as Prince of Wales to make his mark while he still had freedom of maneuver that he wouldn't have as King. The first subject he really went for was architecture. It made an impact.
Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.
America's great newspapers have staffs that range from 50 percent to 70 percent of what they were just a few years ago.
Organ donation is very personal to me. My mother, before her death, was on kidney dialysis for several years.
In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.
I've met men who have been married 19, 20 years, and all of a sudden the wife decides one day she needs to find herself.
It's not so much what do I want to be doing in 15 years, it's how I want to be in 15 years.
The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.
I don't want to spend the next two years in Holiday Inns.
I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.
Now I know why guys like to hug girls. You guys just want to cop a feel. I can't believe that I've fallen for it all these years!
It suddenly struck me - I'm 70 years old. I wonder if I could possibly end my life the way I started it: doing the most joyful thing I ever did, which is to sing.
Lotta people don't realize when you grow up with people, you have an affinity, a relationship you don't get with anyone else. After you're twenty years old, anyone you meet after that, it's different from the people you knew before.
I always say that I've been in a bad mood for maybe 35 years now. I try to lighten it up, but that's what comes out when you get me on camera.
After being rejected for years, I found a publisher for 'Keeper,' and it won prizes, and then I had to write a second and a third book because I kept taking the money and spending it.
