We're trying to set up a movie for me in the near future. It's going to be similar to the story of how I got discovered. Kinda like my own version of '8 Mile.'
Family relationships are just so fascinating - how they shape you as a person, how you can wound each other, how you're imprinted in a way by your family and the conditions under which you grow up.
Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.
To make our way, we must have firm resolve, persistence, tenacity. We must gear ourselves to work hard all the way. We can never let up.
Hybart is a little community I grew up in, so it was just a wonderful time in those years.
I wasn't allowed to watch regular television when I was growing up, only PBS, so I watched 'Masterpiece Theatre' and a lot of Jane Austen. I loved stories where the girl is attracted to a man and it looks like it's not going to work out.
The ultimate would be to compete in a couple more Olympics, hopefully break some world records and wind up my sports career with a couple of years in the WNBA.
Don't change a thing. That's one of the best gimmicks a band could ever come up with.
Winning is like shaving - you do it every day or you wind up looking like a bum.
I like being in movies that have a great story. I'm not so interested in being a Hollywood star. It's a job, you know. When you wake up at six in the morning every day for a week, it feels like hard work.
I think there's a time and place to watch an independent film, or catch up on a French action film on your laptop, or Netflix it, or download it, or watch it on-demand. But I think we also have to maintain the sacredness of the movie theatre as church - especially with event screenings.
We have increased conservation spending, enacted legislation that enables us to clean up and redevelop abandoned brownfields sites across the country, and implemented new clean water standards that will protect us from arsenic.
There's a lady up in heaven who must be very proud of the way the people in Baltimore have treated her boy from the Bronx.
I was brought up in Florence, a beautiful medieval town whose rhythm is completely in antiquity.
I was the middle of five children, and we were five very opinionated siblings. That probably pushed me to learn to speak up for myself.
I just felt that if I went into Speed 2, I just... wouldn't have come up out of the water.
I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.
I grew up on black sand greens. The best tees were old, dry cowpies, believe it or not.
Although, my experience when I've been depressed, not only am I too depressed to sit down and write a song, I'm too depressed to pick up my feet. So if you can at least write about it, you're halfway away from it.
But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?
Doing acting opened up other creative outlets; it made me feel freer as an artist.
I'm not perfect, I do drink. I do smoke. Carson Daly can't go out and get messed up, he can't smoke in front of kids - he's the face of MTV, and he has to be good. But me? I can.
In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I'd give up after a few minutes. I'd find other things to do: Anything but writing.
I grew up in the world of bad television, on my dad's sets and then as a young schmuck on dating shows and so on.
I can't sit back and swallow stuff. I live in a time and place, and in a country on earth where you're not supposed to swallow it. People just gave up.
My mom grew up in a strict Catholic family and moved to New York and became part of the Warhol factory.
You don't quit after you get beat. You pick yourself up, and you start rebuilding to accomplish your goals.
We know that advanced economies with stable governments that borrow in their own currency are capable of running up very high levels of debt without crisis.
I'm definitely bigger than a Rihanna. Pop stars nowadays are all perfect Barbie-doll bodies, and they talk about how they keep their bodies up with hard work, so in my eyes, it's good to have a regular, average body type in the charts.
Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.
But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.
I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.
I expect the audience to come up to my level. I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.
As performers grow older, I reckon there are two ways they can go. They can either be up there, playing more deeply from their guts than ever, or they can be phoning it in so crassly that it leaves a lump in your throat as you leave the venue at the end of the show.
Mary, my little girl, was confirmed in a Buddhist temple. She saw the Life write up on Buddhism, with pictures of the ceremony, and she said she wanted to be confirmed there because she only liked Jesus as a kid. She was a little disappointed in him when he grew up.
