I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.
I am allergic to a certain kind of glue. Most eyelash glues are terrible, the glue in acrylic nails. I get a rash up my arm and face.
I came to Harlem from West Virginia when I was three, after my mother died. My father, who was very poor, gave me up to two wonderful people, my foster parents.
I grew up with nothing, so whenever I got to where I could have something I felt like I needed to have everything I couldn't have when I was young.
Canada had the good health-care system and educational system. It was a privilege for me to grow up there.
My dad has a dry, deadpan sense of humor, and my mom has an unexpected, wacky take on things. They really encouraged laughing at ourselves and the weirdness of situations that come up growing up in politics.
I had this tic where I touch my mouth to my knee, and I'm always screwing up my back. I've had two shoulder surgeries. My doctor just smiles and laughs at me.
Soldiers fighting a daily battle under frightening conditions can feel their leaders are far removed from their reality. There's no magic cure for this challenge, and soothing words that aren't backed up by action encourage cynicism.
When you're 14, 15, and you get together and start making a noise, it is the world opening up. You have that indestructible feeling when you're young. But your ambitions when you are 13 are different when you're 25. By that time, your ambition isn't to be a star anymore; it's to make a living doing music.
I kept thinking, 'How do you make a modern musical?' Then it became clear that I could do it just like a small indie art-house movie, very naturalistically. I could create a world where it's o.k. to break into song, without an orchestra coming up out of nowhere.
I think what 'Saw' did was really open up a huge branch of lots of these other movies that ultimately retroactively gave the first 'Saw' somewhat of a negative reputation.
I'm always sticking up for other people.
I grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Of course I've had my moments of wanting to go back to Scotland, and I almost did a couple of times, but other things just came up.
I grew up with a clock radio next to my bed.
I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn't have anything. It's influenced the way I look at the world.
Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!
I would hole up in my bedroom growing up and teach myself guitar.
'Five, Six, Seven, Nate!' opens on my 13-year-old protagonist packing up a duffel bag and bidding his Midwestern town goodbye, heading off to start rehearsals for his New York City debut in 'E.T.: The Musical.'
My audience expects cold, hard truth. They don't expect me to dance around it. They expect me to say it the way they think it. That's part of my brand. If I don't do that, then my audience goes, 'What's up? Is he sick or something? What's wrong with him?' The entity has a brand.
These days politics, religion, media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over.
I was never exposed to a great deal of racism, but the Chicago I grew up in was very, very segregated.
Sometimes, if you begin to sing in a halfhearted mood, you can sing yourself up the ladder. Singing will often make the heart rise.
I'm facing upstage, with my back to the audience, and the spotlight comes up on my back as I start singing.
Writing-wise, I started when I was 17. Whatever was bothering me, I could just write about it in a song. I was in the west suburbs of Chicago, then I moved an hour south, and then I went to school up on the South Side - Saint Xavier, though I was at Purdue for a second before I dropped out.
It is easy to understand why conflict is so often highlighted: Writers of headlines or promotional copy want to catch attention and attract an audience. They are usually under time pressure, which lures them to established, conventionalized ways of expressing ideas in the absence of leisure to think up entirely new ones.
There is a lot of work out there to take people out of the loop in things like medical diagnosis. But if you are taking humans out of the loop, you are in danger of ending up with a very cold form of AI that really has no sense of human interest, human emotions, or human values.
If you wake up deciding what you want to give versus what you're going to get, you become a more successful person.
I gave up on my looks a long time ago.
I didn't really know you could make a living in songwriting. I was just very fortunate to have the opportunity to play a few songs for a guy there named Jimmy Ritchey. Through that meeting, I met another couple guys and ended up getting a publishing deal in Nashville.
In the South, I think, food mirrors our lives. When I was growing up, no matter what you were grieving or celebrating, my mama would be at the door with a cake or a pie.
I always wanted to be an actress, but my parents were adamant that I complete my studies first before I take up acting.
The reason I can play loads of instruments is because I kept giving up and trying another one.
I was born in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school.
When you go into the theatre and the lights dim, you want to entertain people from beginning to end. You want them to be swept up in your story, on the edge of their seats, unable to wait to see what happens next, be blown away and afterwards just go, 'Wow!'
I grew up working in Canada so everything was low budget.
