My father was a screenwriter, and I kind of grew up in that world. I always had a mind for characters and dialogue, and my head was filled with that stuff, so it seemed like a good place to start.
I couldn't deliver a joke if you asked me to. It would have to be live and spontaneous. And that's what I was able to have in New York, at 9 o'clock in the morning, and people all over the country seemed to respond to it.
Growing up in inner-city Glasgow, it sometimes seemed to me money hadn't been invented.
After working with clothes for so long, it seemed right to design them.
Growing up, Paul Newman seemed like the ultimate manly actor. And then, I got to work with him and we became friends, so that was nice.
The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.
To some degree, I was very dubious of the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' idea - taking a theme park ride and turning into a film - even though they seemed to end up being quite fun films.
The prize seemed to change my professional life very little.
No leader did more for his country than Winston Churchill. Brave, magnanimous, traditional, he was like a king-general from Britain's heroic past. His gigantic qualities set him apart from ordinary humanity; there seemed no danger he feared, no effort too great for his limitless energies.
I went to about one frat party a year. A year seemed to be enough time for me to forget how much I didn't like frat parties, and my friends would eventually convince me to go to one. Cheap beer, guys looking for a quick hook-up, and girls playing 'dumb' to get in on the hook-up. I just never got into it.
When I did get home this last time, we had all these plans to go out. And then we hardly stepped outside because the time together seemed too precious.
And I seemed to discern a power and meaning in the old, which the more impassioned would not allow.
The Cold War was waged in a particularly brutal and cynical way in Africa, and Africa seemed powerless to do anything to stop it.
I first got sick after I had my daughter, Kimberly, 21 years ago. I'd always been energetic and never had any serious medical problems. Then I got very sick with a high fever. They told me I had mononucleosis. I became pregnant right away with Sean, and after he was born, I never seemed to recover.
A maverick feels like he has no choice however difficult his choice of expression. In my case, it was going backwards into tonality. It seemed so wrong. The idea that progress is going into the past in a new way is very strange, even though there are precedents.
An entire nation, it seemed, was standing in one long breadline, desperate for even the barest essentials. It was a crisis of monumental proportions. It was known as the Great Depression.
I was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.
Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20.
Yeah. I mean, it just seemed to me that it was - I felt so helpless to this business of not having any papers. That seems like a throwback to a schoolboy.
I still have in my memory, almost agonizing impressions of a serious illness which I had when I was about eight years old. Those about me called it scarlet fever, and its very name seemed to have a diabolical quality.
If you recall, we have a huge list of celebrities who had announced they'd leave the country if Trump won. It probably seemed like a safe play for attention at the time, but now they've got egg on their faces, because, of course, none of them are actually leaving. Some of them have gone silent, while others, like Amy Schumer, say it was a joke.
Joy Division finished the 1970s on a high. Our debut album, 'Unknown Pleasures,' was doing well; we'd just finished a hugely enjoyable and successful tour. The band's profile was higher than it had ever been, and it seemed to be growing by the day.
It was only through getting interested in more out-there and avant-garde forms that the musical suddenly seemed like such a wonderful genre to me.
Improv seemed to replace stand-up, which was very big before that. Stand-up comedy was real hot in the late '80s and through the '90s.
It seemed romantic but also tragic - people would be winning but then lose it all, or crash but fight on, break bones but get back on their bikes and try to finish. Just getting to the end was seen as an achievement in itself.
About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation like a bee buzzing in blind fury.
The encouragement I got from Campbell was a quick check and praise. Once the Space Beagle was launched on its mission, it seemed natural for it to breed additional thoughts.
But to make a holiday record that involves favorite American songs and then also get to sing about Jesus birth, it just seemed like a real easy, subtle way to combine a couple of things that I love.
I venture to allude to the impression which seemed generally to prevail among their brethren across the seas, that the Old Country must wake up if she intends to maintain her old position of pre-eminence in her colonial trade against foreign competitors.
What attracted me to immunology was that the whole thing seemed to revolve around a very simple experiment: take two different antibody molecules and compare their primary sequences.
Perhaps arising from a fascination with animals, biology seemed the most interesting of sciences to me as a child.
And then, when I thought about joining the Air Force, flying seemed like a natural extension of the motorcycling experience. You're going faster, higher. You're operating a machine that's a lot more powerful than you are.
It seemed like a wonderful honor to have the Film Society of Lincoln Center screen 'The Films of Raquel Welch.' It shows a lot of a variety in what they've chosen; it kind of runs the gamut of my film career.
I wasn't a troublemaker. I wasn't impertinent. The teachers liked me. But year after year, the comments on my report cards basically came down to a single point, and it was 100% accurate: I seemed to get nothing whatsoever out of all those long hours spent in the classroom.
But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality.
I didn't really want to be a filmmaker, growing up. Other than Spike Lee's movies, I would think, 'Where is a place for me?' We were so damn poor that it just seemed too far beyond.
