When I first started acting, everyone in my family did not want me to act.
I have a strong and strange character, and I've rarely met directors who knew what to do with this character. One of the few who did was my father, and in the theatre, Arthur Nauzyciel.
I don't sing now, because I had polio when I was 15, bulbar polio. This was when the epidemic was happening. And I was lucky that it didn't affect my lungs or my legs. It went to my face and kind of paralyzed my vocal chords, and I wasn't able to sing. And they said I was very lucky that I would get over it, which I did.
I shaved the back of my head once and did the asymmetrical hair.
Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.
I think I might have played a song on piano or guitar in a school talent show. I went to an all girls school, so there were always little things going on, but it wasn't really until I was 17 that I did a proper performance. My first big one was Glastonbury, before I was signed.
Many years ago... many, many years ago, I brought up a boy, and I said to him, 'Son, if you ever become a writer, try to write a good part for your old man sometime.' Well, by cracky, that's what he did!
No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world.
I did a year of 'Guiding Light', and I was going to be a movie actor or a stage actor, but not a TV actor. That just wasn't going to happen. And obviously, things changed so remarkably.
The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.
A lot of us have done bullying and didn't even realize we did it.
A person's credit report is one of the most important tools consumers can use to maintain their financial security and credit rating, but for so long many did not know how to obtain one, or what to do with the information it provided.
If anybody had a reason to become a delinquent, to become a criminal, to be angry at the man, to be angry at the white man, to be angry at America, it's my dad, but he did not feel that way at all.
I was a terrible loser growing up. I took it far too seriously. There were water works if I lost. I would go home and break it down in angry detail: How did I lose? What could I do next time?
I have fame on the level of a Marilyn Monroe or an Elvis Presley, but part of the reason I didn't go the way they did was because of my beliefs. People make judgments about Scientology, but often they don't know what they're talking about.
In school, I did a lot of computer work. I'd take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.
My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family's futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me.
They do not air 'GH' in Holland, so I don't get recognized. But the Dutch are wonderfully unimpressed with celebrity, so even if the show did play over there it probably wouldn't affect things much. It's a wonderful life and I am so blessed.
What we did with 'AllThingsD', though, was very different. We weren't taking a newspaper and putting it on the web; we were creating a digital native product, and we did it inside of a very old, stuffy newspaper company at the time.
I've gotten jobs that I think I've done the worst audition I ever did, and I got the job. I've done the best audition I've ever done in my entire life, and I haven't gotten the job.
Actors are almost conditioned to get their director's approval. 'I just did my song and dance, boss. What did you think?' Actors are infantilized so much.
Long made it possible for me to get on records, so what little money he did take from me, if any at all, he was entitled to it. He didn't take something from me.
Compared to what comics say today, I'm a monk, but in those days, it was unheard of to make fun of people like I did. Of course, they exaggerated how outrageous I really was.
When did the word 'compromise' get compromised? When did the negative connotations of 'He was caught in a compromising position' or 'She compromised her ethics' replace the positive connotations of 'They reached a compromise'?
I did get a degree in theater and took some voice-over classes.
I'm releasing a single. It's called 'Live it Up.' It was based on my Euro trip. I only write my own music. I don't let other people write it at all. So I've been working on that a lot. There's three singles coming out. The producer of The Fray who did their double-platinum album 'How to Save a Life,' I'm working with him. He's producing me.
Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?
For years, I had a top secret clearance and never left Russia. Just once did I go to Bulgaria with my wife for a holiday at the Golden Sands resort, but I could not mention my real name. I was allowed to travel abroad only in the early 1990s.
French people don't breastfeed. And I did it. My mum freaked out. She didn't get it at all. French royalty thought it wasn't chic to breastfeed their kids, so they would send them to a wet nurse. It's looked down on.
I never worked with a dialogue coach before, but I'd hate it if an American did a British accent and didn't do it well. It would be insulting.
I don't feel like anyone should follow what I did.
Growing up in Oakland, we did things like white t-shirt, blue jeans and Nikes. That was my get down, how I was going to rock. And if you look at me right now, I'm pretty much black tee, blue jeans and some sneakers.
Making $30,000 on my first business deal was exciting, but not as exciting as the sudden knowledge that I did not have to work for anyone again.
For a long time, I resisted seeing 'The Sound of Music,' but when I finally did, I cried.
When we were younger, playing a bar or a club, we did what we did to get as many people to like what we were doing. I wanted the person in the back of the room to like it as much as the ones in the front. That's how I've always looked at it.
I saw this cool interview with Amy Adams from when she did 'Enchanted' and played a princess, and when kids came up to her with no make-up and ripped jeans on, she said, 'I'm off duty. I'm an off-duty princess', and I thought that was quite sweet.
