I was always a visual artist my whole life, and I came to music really late - when I was 21 or 22 was the first time I ever touched a musical instrument. For me, it was always this fun side hobby.
It used to be that almost all innovation came from the U.S. and a small number of other developed countries. That's no longer the case, and as China and India grow, it's changing even more. Expect a lot more Chinese and Indian Nobel prizes in the future.
Before the palefaces came among us, we enjoyed the happiness of unbounded freedom and were acquainted with neither riches, wants, nor oppression.
I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion.
I came here to help make America more competitive and prosperous by developing an energy policy that increases conservation, promotes cleaner technologies, encourages development of renewables and enhances domestic production of gas and oil.
I wouldn't believe him if he said the sun came up in the east.
The first profile piece on myself came about after my Rabbi sent information to the Jewish Chronicle on what I was up to. The story was then picked up by one of the nationals and things grew from there.
I didn't get into this for fame, I genuinely didn't. I love acting, and I know that's a cliche, but I didn't, really, I was very naive when it came to the whole being recognized thing.
I am a disaster magnet. I came home from our first anniversary vacation with jellyfish stings, a puncture wound from a wrought iron pineapple and a cork-shaped bruise in my cleavage.
The thinnest I've ever been was after I had my appendix out, during the London run of The Seagull. I went down to 112 pounds and realized my brain doesn't work when I'm that thin, so I can't do my job. That's why, when I came out here, I never had that whole Hollywood pressure thing.
I started in the club route. I did the alternative scene later on. When I lived in New York, I did the Luna Lounge and stuff, where Janeane Garofalo and David Cross and all those guys worked out of, but I came from a comedy club background. I'm proud of that background. I'm one of the people that really crossed over and did both.
When I first came along in the business, they didn't really like the idea of my name being Raquel.
George Bush is a fan of mine, he came to see me in the Seventies. His coke dealer brought him.
I did go to cheder and was a bar mitzvah. We were members of an Orthodox synagogue, although we were not religious. My grandfather was Polish. He came to Ireland in the '30s.
The odds of being successful are the same for every group that is educated in America. It's just that the group that is not wealthy is 95 percent of the population. So if there are 100 successful people in a room, probably 95 out of 100 came from more modest means.
Most correspondents came from the former colonial powers - there were British, French, and a lot of Italians, because there were a lot of Italian communities there. And of course there were a lot of Russians.
When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome.
A guy friend and I went to California Pizza Kitchen, and a group of pretty girls came over to us and said, 'You guys are gay, right?'
Through these offices it was my privilege to get to know almost every Jewish person, and those whom I did not come to know through these offices I came to know through love and a desire to know my brethren, the members of my people.
Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.
I came to Los Angeles only after filming 'A Good Day to Die Hard,' when I was cast in the independent movie 'Delirium.' Director Lee Roy Kunz was looking everywhere for a Russian actress. He saw my photos, and only then he learned where I starred before! Eventually, I spent several months in the U.S., and we made the film quickly.
I came to Ireland 20 years ago as a student, hitch-hiking round for a week and staying in Dublin.
I love Madonna! If you want to see the Madonna I know, just go on YouTube and you'll see those early interviews before the record came out. She was giddy and wonderful and giggly and happy and so excited looking towards the future.
For me N.M.E. was a very big thing. When I first came to the United Kingdom I started taking pictures for them and I became their main photographer for five years, and that's really been the basis of everything I've been doing since.
When I came to England, the first director I met was Charles Sturridge, who told me, 'You speak like somebody out of the 1950s.'
I was around computers from birth; we had one of the first Macs, which came out shortly before I was born, and my dad ran a company that wrote computer operating systems. I don't think I have any particular technical skills; I just got a really large head start.
Well, I thought the Sex Pistols were the cream of the crop. They came in and topped everybody, for sure. They took all the existing strands and made a perfect package out of them.
I knew, however, that the next morning after the fight I would have to get away, and I did just in time, for a full company came early to look for me and were furious because I had escaped them.
In those days, between the ages of 12 and 18 you meant nothing. You were the extra place at the side table if someone came to dinner. You were of no interest to anyone.
Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys from time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that.
My parents came from Russia and suddenly they wound up in Boston, Massachusetts, Brookline, Massachusetts and they felt the sun rose and set on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's backside because he meant so much to them. This was freedom. This was something totally different from the Russia they had left.
I came from Mechanicsville, Virginia, where you have four seasons.
Then we did what we called basically I suppose a club tour in England, which was the time I think that our second album came out, we club toured around the whole country where the venues were hold to five hundreds upwards to that sort of thing you know.
We march on toward the realization of the American Dream. We are not diverted by those who would deny opportunity based on what we look like or where we came from or who would deny equality based on who we love.
I've made my best personal investments when I've been a user of the product. Like Apple. The epiphany for me came when I purchased my fifth iPod and I hadn't unwrapped my fourth. It was still in the plastic case.
The creation of God itself, I deduced, came from our primal fear.
