For whatever reason, I decided: 'I'm 18, I'm a man, I'm going to grow a moustache' - and it was pathetic for years - it was awful.
Part of my head will always be in the years after World War II - the five years before Korea started.
I was shooting for a Telugu film at the Taj Mahal in Agra, and there were all these women and children pointing and screaming, 'Rowdy Rathore.' But I am not really 'Rowdy Rathore.' I am the guy who did the original version of 'Rowdy Rathore' six years ago.
What's changed is we now have good anatomical, geological, archaeological evidence that Neanderthals are not our ancestors. When I wrote 'Lucy,' I considered Neanderthals ancestors of modern humans. We have gone back twice the age of Lucy, six million years. And we see that upright bipedal walking goes back that far in time.
I started using the Internet when I was 12 years old. I would go into chat rooms and flirt. It was the beginning of the Internet for young people.
It's 2010. I'm forty-three years old. I've just turned in the final draft of what will be my third novel when I decide I want a tattoo. Maybe it's a middle-age thing. Or maybe now that my kids are nearly grown and I have a career in place, I'm finally coming into my own.
I was married for 18 years to a woman who wanted me to get sober for all 18 years and I never did. She finally came to her senses and divorced me.
I feel like I've paid a really heavy cost, a really heavy physical health cost, for the years of touring and how physical I've been onstage.
The fun never goes out, but it changes with the years, with winning and losing.
Charles Darwin sailed around the world for two years on the 'Beagle,' and he had quite a bit of interest in things like the iguanas of the Galapagos, even though they were primitive compared to your average Englishman.
I have never been married. I don't know if I will ever marry, though I hope to. When I am asked why I have not married, I explain that my parents have been happily married for 42 years. The bar feels so very high for that kind of commitment.
'Paris, Texas' is the first film that I've totally cared about, the first movie I totally wanted to do - and that after 27 years that I considered my prison term.
It's easy to laugh at etiquette, but in a hundred years, our children's grandchildren will almost certainly be laughing at us.
I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of their love - no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me, nothing is sadder than my parents' divorce.
Watching 'Doctor Who' in the United States meant I was always behind the times - PBS didn't get new episodes until two years after they ran, and I was aware of the show's cancellation before the characters themselves knew, at least in my corner of the world.
America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.
Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordinary stuff.
My brother was four years older and always building tree houses. Whether I wanted to or not, I learned carpentry.
I don't just want to focus on soccer, soccer, soccer. You're going to look back 20 years from now and of course you're going to remember the games. But I'm going to remember seeing my family in the stands.
In 'Angels in America,' I got to fulfill a lifelong dream. I was in the air eight nights a week for two years, and I just loved it.
A few performances have been left out of the various Woodstock soundtracks and film edits over the years, most notably The Grateful Dead.
Hip hop was definitely, far and away, the primary influence for at least 10 years of my life. From about 7 or 8 on till about 15 or 16, that's all I listened to.
I had to travel into the future and direct 'Jurassic World' as myself in 20 years - and I did.
Twenty years ago my parents wouldn't know who the X-Men were, and now everybody knows that stuff. It means that deconstruction of the superhero is something you can do. All those movies have led to a point where we can finally have 'Watchmen' with a Superman character who doesn't want to save the world and a Batman who has trouble in bed.
We are not born with effective vision. The human infant has to learn how to see. The eyes gather information, they transmit it to the brain, but the brain doesn't know how to process it yet. We learn how to see in a way that's very similar to the way we learn how to speak. It takes a couple of years.
I didn't want to look back in 10 or 20 years and say, 'Yes, I always wanted to write that piano sonata or that novel, but I never had time.'
'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.
I saw all the moral decay you could, beginning at 2 years old. But I also got to see how the other half lived.
Even if you feel like your debt is just never going to go away, think long and hard before declaring bankruptcy. Declaring bankruptcy means that getting a loan for anything will be next to impossible for the next 10 years.
Our schools should get five years to get back to where they were in 1963. If they're still bad maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools.
The big, defining feature of Palmares Tres government is its system of summer kings. The idea is that women 'Aunties' rule, led by a queen with a term limit of 10 years. Men aren't entirely shut out from this system - in fact, they have one of the most important roles in the government - but it's strictly delimited.
The founder of Dell found ways of delivering Hewlett Packard's most profitable products for much lower prices but forgot to deliver their quality so within a few years had fallen behind again. Ideas need constant renewal. A great idea will never be perfect and will never work perfectly in all markets and all seasons.
Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.
I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.
I know where I'm going and I have told the French. I am sure if hope is there, we will be able to put France back on its feet... to live better in five years than we do today.
Only once in a thousand years or so do we get to hear a Mozart or see a Picasso or read a Shakespeare. Ali was one of them, and yet at his heart, he was still a kid from Louisville who ran with the gods and walked with the crippled and smiled at the foolishness of it all.
