It's always so nerve-wracking being up there on stage. It's even harder playing in your hometown - and I have a couple of home towns - but, you're playing for all the people you knew in high school, so it causes no small degree of panic in my mind.
Being taught to despise your body is being taught to perhaps admire someone else's body more than yours - being taught that your body is good for certain things and not for others.
Having to stake out your identity and have people question whether or not you're being yourself was a tension that I could relate to.
Being a mum is the best thing that has ever been given to me in my life.
Being a person who has had plastic surgery and goes to the gym five days a week to work my muscles up so they don't look atrophied as a 60-year-old, I don't disparage people who want to maintain their appearance. But what I don't want is a society that tells me I have to.
I don't look at it as writing a book in a videogame universe. I look at it as writing for 'Halo', which for me, transcends being just a great video game. It's evolving into a whole new mythology.
I can remember as a young lieutenant being sent into the DMZ in the divided Vietnam, from North Vietnam.
There is no basis to say I'm being coy about running for president. If I chose to explore the presidency, I wouldn't do it in a backward way. I'll say, 'I'm exploring the presidency.'
I mean, every child at one stage dreams of being a prince or a princess.
I'm so used to being misunderstood.
I was always wrapped around music being a tradition, a skill.
I have never made fun of religion. Religion is something I don't even want to mess with, because I am really afraid of the clouds opening up and my being struck by lightning.
Of course I'd like children. But I have to get over my impression that being pregnant is like popping corn. You expand and expand until you pop.
My hardest thing was to let go, to be happy for everybody and just to enjoy. And go back to being what you were before you became an artist, and that was just a fan.
I hated singing, I hated being on stage; I hated being in the Cranberries. I was constantly crying. I was going insane. I wanted to be a shopkeeper, a hairdresser, anything. I was so desperate to have a reality, friends, a regular, boring life. I missed that.
Being outside the candy store looking in is the state of people today. Whether you're in a Pakistani village watching somebody in a car drive by, or you're in the city of Lahore going to a restaurant and seeing somebody with a security entourage coming in... you're exposed to people with more.
Children, I always think, are just putting on a performance of being naive and not understanding anything. I have worked with children in films, and they're treated as adults and they just drop the pretense of being children.
When I was a kid growing up, my dad being a football coach, he asked the same question of all the assistants that he ever hired: 'Is your goal to be a head football coach?'
The fact that I like to make characters doesn't mean that I like to watch my characters being made, my performance.
Being so doopity! It's awesome. And I think it's just one of the reasons that people should get hitched on with the WWE Network. It's more than just these network specials like 'WrestleMania' and like 'SummerSlam'. It's programming geared for the WWE universe.
I was never a worker. And that's not even being arrogant. I was just never a worker.
In the first phase of shock over, say, your mortgage being called in or your job washed out, it's essential to engage with others and share the fear, release the feelings, do fun things to take your mind off it.
Being president of a major public university is the most political nonpolitical office around.
This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.
Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock.
I have no great interest in being remembered as a great creative filmmaker.
I have not survived 50 years in showbusiness by being Mr. Nice. If you are weak, this business eats you up.
The history of screenwriting - of what we do - is more than 100 years old. It's thousands of years old, going back to Sophocles and Euripedes. I believe the only - the only - separation for being a dramatist is reading drama.
I'll be honest with you: before I heard Nicki rapping, I probably wouldn't have thought to rap myself. Just to see a female doing it and being in there with the guys, it was motivation.
I don't think about the gender thing very much. But when I speak at schools, I've had female students say to me afterwards, "I never envisioned myself being a director, since I've never seen women do it." But after seeing me, they can picture themselves directing, so maybe we'll see more female directors.
The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn't do for me when I was a girl. I am so ready to be that little girl's mother.
Every time one person gets a piece of information, the likelihood of that information being exposed grows exponentially. It's no longer two people. It's two people squared.
Bathtubs, pools, water - to me, it's a very essential part of being grounded and sensual and feeling yourself.
To my mind, there is a reason that music is there and it's about being human.
I wasn't perfect and didn't have it together. I felt alone. So through acting, I decided to be a shape shifter and with every role become the character instead of being myself. It meant about 10 years of no one knowing I was the same person in every movie.
That's what rock music is, I think - constantly searching for authenticity, and being as honest as possible.
