I was just a guy who ran away from home at 16 because my parents were getting a divorce and the judge was making me choose which parent to live with. I didn't want to make that choice. I ended up in New York City.
Where I grew up, in a remote village at the back of a valley, the old still thought the dead needed attending to - a notion so universal, it's enscribed in all religions. If you didn't, they might exact revenge upon the living.
I love a good Roy Rogers or Shirley Temple, and I had to give those up. And Philly cheesesteaks. I love Philly cheesesteaks, and now they really aren't around anymore.
I don't have a permanent place where I live. I'm in Atlanta about six or seven months out of the year. I gave up on my place in New York. I don't have a place in L.A., but sometimes when I go there for the hiatus, I stay in temporary housing. It's all over the place, and I don't know where I live!
I was actually pretty shy in school. My defense mechanism was to be the class clown. I remember getting into a lot of trouble for being disruptive, and I was brought in front of the headteacher, who said: 'What's going to happen to you; what are you going to do when you grow up?' and I said: 'Well, I'm obviously going to be a comedian.'
I don't know if I'm an action star or if that's just how things are shaping up. I would hate to be boxed into that forever, but it's probably just a strength as far as my type goes, and I'm fine with that.
In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.
Metaphorically speaking, of course, if I put a problem behind my pillow and fall asleep, very often because my brain went to sleep with that idea or the problem alive, very often in the middle of the night I wake up, and I wake up with a solution or with a direction of solution.
I still have a passion for the music, which is such a beautiful thing. I still wake up in the middle of the night out of a dream and have a melody in my head, and run to my piano.
I think it is shocking that 15- and 16-year-olds leave school unable to add up and with the reading ability of a four-year-old.
Sometimes there's one person in the audience laughing hysterically, and it's so much fun. You end up playing the entire play to them.
Good journalism, I think, represents life and if you try to organize something too neatly it usually blows up in your face and doesn't really happen the way you want it to.
I grew up in the Alps and France, and Barbie was my first exposure to the American woman. For me she was blonde, she was free and she was fun.
My mom, who's been in the restaurant business for 40 years, is the number-one influence in my life. But I look up to a lot of people in the industry. Tops on my list is Mario Batali. My mom and Mario taught me the same lesson: Food is love.
I had a mild case of polio - not enough to put me in an iron lung, but enough to keep me bedridden for weeks. As I came out of it, my mom wanted to do something for me. She realized that, growing up in the city, I'd missed out on a lot of nature.
When I grow up, I still want to be a director.
I was born and grew up in Palm Springs. It's a great place to grow up, a real small town.
You must go after your wish. As soon as you start to pursue a dream, your life wakes up and everything has meaning.
When I was a kid, we didn't really leave Cambridge, which was the town where I grew up in.
We've all got strange things about us and Lynch picks those things up.
If we really wanted to be cool, and everyone in the world had Pro Tools, we could just put it up on the internet and everyone could make their own record out of it.
While you're setting something up that's educational for yourself, you have an opportunity to teach others at the same time.
I think it's great that young girls have the WNBA to look up to now.
I wish I could have known earlier that you have all the time you'll need right up to the day you die.
I grew up playing field hockey and lacrosse - prep school sport - and I was terrible at them.
I was always bigger than the other girls. My sisters are very, very beautiful and very skinny, and I've always had a more muscular body. So I grew up with a different mentality.
I consider myself a brown American or a man of color before I would say Sri Lankan, to be honest. I didn't grow up there. There was a pretty brutal civil war there from 1983 until 2009. So we weren't able to go back very much. I've gone back as an adult. But I grew up in Pennsylvania.
If bringing up the next generation is important, why aren't they the best qualified, the best paid? Why aren't we as concerned about their career progression as we are about those who work in the education or health services?
My uncle is from Trinidad, so, ever since I was 7, I grew up listening to Soca, the genre that's from there. It's my favorite sound.
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
The individual Siemens businesses must be able to keep up with the specialists in the industry and be at least as good as their strongest competitors.
I had heard Ornette a couple of times, but I didn't really know where he was coming from until we started the record and it was beautiful, Fred. It opened up my mind.
Being a kid and growing up is such a cool part of life.
I still use a lot of good values from growing up in the Church, and there was a sense of community. But you were also being heavily judged by people that wanted to look down on you for not being as great as they are.
Once you put yourself in the hands of the government, you could end up in Utah.
The booking agent had the audacity to take 10 percent, so we wound up with about $100 a week apiece.
