My parents are both very funny but they're also relatively soft-spoken, normal human beings while I'm just a lunatic. I don't know where this loud, ballsy, hammy ridiculousness came from. I'm just glad I followed my goals and my parents did too. It's not like we even had a plan when I dragged my mom to Los Angeles.
With 'The Leftovers,' I was actually super, super lucky. It was my first major audition. When I came out, the casting director was kissing me on the face, and I was like, 'Oh, that's probably a good sign.'
My intention when I came into this industry was to be a musician, not necessarily a recording artist, just a musician in general. And that's the reason I went to college and got my degree, which has been great for me. It's helped me a lot with my career.
My life came down to being a granny and watching a lot of television.
I came to America when I was 9. My mother brought me.
I came here as a practical man, to talk, not simply on the question of peace and war, but to treat another question which is of hardly less importance - the enormous and burdensome standing armaments which it is the practice of modern Governments to sustain in time of peace.
When the first record came out, I'd go down to radio stations pretty much every day to get the record played, and I would walk in and they'd tell us how much they loved the record, but they weren't sure how much they could play it because they were already playing a girl.
I got along better with the guys than with the girls. Only two girls came up to talk to me. Later I found out they were telling their boyfriends, 'If you talk to her, I'll kill you.' It's always rough with that high school thing.
The final effort came when our reconnaissance team reported contact with the POWs and their guards by radio near midnight at a pre-arranged crossing site.
I was always the smallest role in community theater and school plays. I always had two lines - I was the kid that came on stage and said one thing and then left, and that was my part for the play.
Jessica Simpson is the youth ambassador for Operation Smile, and an episode of The Apprentice featured a team managing a charity concert she put on. Donald Trump came on stage and pledged a donation.
I had a very tough childhood. I came here from Italy in the '70s and didn't speak a word of English, so the kids at school tormented me. Truly, it was horrifying the names they called me, and the teachers never really did a thing to stop it.
In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.
Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea.
When 'Deadwood' came along, it was totally like Shakespeare. The long speeches were like soliloquies. If one phrase of a monologue was out of whack, the entire one-page speech didn't work.
When it came to kissing, Harlow was the best.
I remember I was changing to one phone from another and going through my old contact details, and so I was having to delete duplicate numbers to make room, and up came the name of someone who died, and... it felt hard to delete the name.
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
My first thought when I came here was that I understood why there are so many great Irish writers - because there is something mystical in the air. There's always this cloudy, moody sky and it's challenging.
Punk rock really came out of N.Y. as a philosophy before the groups were ever recorded. I had a kind-of intellectual interest in the idea of creating a new scene that could be a grassroots thing.
Michel Gondry's 'Green Hornet' was another franchise flick that felt like it came out of left field - I thought in a good way, but most audiences disagreed.
My grandparents and my mom came from Cuba back in the '60s because they were fleeing from communism and Castro. I wouldn't be here otherwise.
It was 1978 when Superman came out, and I kept thinking, Why don't they do something about it? They've done all these crappy attempts at comic book film adaptations. What can we do different? Why don't we just re-release this thing?
The attitude among the people I knew was, 'Fleur wants to be a singer' but it was never, 'Go for it. You can do it.' Everyone was cynical because we'd never seen anyone where we came from do it.
It used to be that you came out of school, and you got married - those who were going to get married. But my peers are getting married in their early 30s, so now there's like this extra 10 years of that angst.
The show did go on, but came very close to not going on at all.
We didn't name Birdie before she was born. When she came out I said, 'I think we gotta go with Birdie, I think that's her name.'
So I kind of lost track for a while, then I came back, I pulled myself together and I decided when I was 15 that I'm going to get sober and I'm going to become an actress.
I came along and was a teenager in the Depression, and nobody had jobs. So I went out hitchhiking, when I met a man named Woody Guthrie. He was the single biggest part of my education.
But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome - people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.
President Bush remained undeterred by the massive display of American opposition, even though much of it came from the hundreds of thousands of voters who supported him by voting for Nader.
Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.
My mother had been an actress and we came from that world in New York, the theater world and the downtown sort of theater scene, and so I guess we didn't really have what you'd call like a Hollywood kind of life at all.
If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.
When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.
You have to face the fact that I have no reputation as a composer; I have my reputation as a songwriter and a performer-and that opportunity came this summer, when I was invited to perform at the Lincoln Centre festival in New York... three nights.
