In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.
Jerry Seinfeld made a puddle, I stepped in it, and wonderful things happened.
I don't think I was ever designed to be a ubiquitous worldwide star. I'm a singer-songwriter writing quite personal songs. You're not supposed to chuck me on a stage with bells and whistles. There was a struggle ahead after that happened, and perhaps I was trying to write songs to compete in that arena.
I think Operation Smile is in more than 22 countries, mostly Third World. It just happened that my schedule opened up at the time they were heading to Vietnam.
Lucian Freud's career affirms that the only thing an artist can do is remain true to whatever vision, (lack of) talent, or ideas that happened to pick them in order to be made known to the world.
People like music when they're in love, but they don't need it as much. You need music when you're missing someone or you're pining for someone or you're forgetting someone or you're trying to process what just happened.
I went through my adolescence having this revelatory experience - I can have any music I want, and I can get it immediately. For me and for a lot of people I know, there's this musical eclecticism that happened.
As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
But when 9/11 struck, I had a change of heart. I knew the story had to be told because what happened at 9/11 is a direct result of what the economic hit men are doing.
Things happened there that I don't think are the finest hours for anybody, whether it was a journalist, the legal system or, in that case of the political system, who would say that was an example of when Washington worked best.
But even before that, in 1980 I went so far as to write a book about what had happened. And I wrote all about the bank robbery, I went ahead and printed it even though I had no use immunity for it.
Art history became an A-level option at my school the year I started sixth form. This happened because another student and I cajoled and bullied the head of the art department into arranging it with the examination board.
I'm not as concerned about me. What's happened to me has been great. I got five great kids. Seventeen grandchildren.
Now that we are cool, he said, and regret that we hurt each other, I am not sorry that it happened.
I recorded that because it happened to me. I wasn't making a point.
But I never really thought that I would be extraordinarily successful at skating, it's just something that happened, you know.
You start at the end, and then go back and write and go that way. Not everyone does, but I do. Some people just sit down at the page and start off. I start from what happened, including the why.
The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what's really happened.
And then my chance really happened in 1996 when we added the second flight of the tether satellite.
A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way away.
Doing something like that, quite radically changing your approach to sound in one go, could leave you high and dry. It's happened before where people have changed direction and then everyone's stopped liking their music.
What's happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.
It was a long, difficult summer of 2004. That was a leap year, so several things happened - the Olympics and presidential election. And right in the middle of the election campaign - and I don't think this was an accident - the 9/11 Commission delivers its report.
What is for sale, what is not? If we really think that making your apologies to your wife or reading a bedside story to your child are activities that we can pay a stranger to do, then, without moralising, what has happened to us?
I never dreamt that I would do all the things that I have done. But things just happened to me all the time.
It appears to me that no one has learned a thing; that Wall Street is still operating as if 2008 never happened.
If I signed it that is the way it really happened. I don't know of any individuals who are saying anything different. I have no idea what is going on with that.
As it happened, I had a friend who was a good person who liked to present himself as a dreadful one. Using him as a role model, I created the first Buck Godot strip.
We can't forget what happened on May 4th, 1970, when four students gave up their lives because they had the American constitutional right of peaceful protest. They gave up their lives. And to sing that song in that spot on that anniversary was very emotional for us.
I never wanted to be Marilyn - it just happened. Marilyn's like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane.
I'll never forget one morning I walked in and I had a hell of a bruise - it had been a difficult night the night before - and a client said to me, 'Good God, Vidal, what happened to your face?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing, madam, I just fell over a hairpin.'
Well, capitalism is going to grow and grow. The nature of it is that the guy who has the most poker chips on the table has more leverage than everyone else. He can eventually outbluff everyone else and outraise everyone else at the table. That's what has happened and it needs to be corrected.
Sci-fi always runs out a little bit ahead of reality, right? Automatic doors in 'Star Trek,' stuff like that. It all happened, didn't it, finally?
My feeling has always been that 'Good Eats' would have never happened had it been left to a committee.
The one time I was an actor, it happened to be in a globally dominant juggernaut. That was lucky.
With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.
