I come from a very humble background. My father had to work really hard to become an assistant director. For a large part of his youth, he worked in a mill and took up odd jobs to make ends meet. We lived in a small room and could only afford a meal a day.
And if real life was like the movies, I should have lived happily ever after.
My parents lived a modest life, and their main concern was the education of their children. My father was a self-taught man but had a great intellectual curiosity, not only for biblical and talmudic texts, but also for philosophy, psychoanalysis and history.
When tragedy strikes, or even when it looms, our families will have the opportunity to look into our hearts to see whether we know what we said we knew. Our children will watch, feel the Spirit confirm that we lived as we preached, remember that confirmation, and pass the story across the generations.
I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash.
We lived on isolated farms and ranches, far from anybody, and when I was young I knew very few other kids, so I lived to a great extent in my imagination.
I kind of lived by the code of 'I'm going to be a hard-working guy.' And no matter how successful, there is something I can do better. That's kind of the drive I live on.
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.
My parents came from the Kyushu Island in the Southern part of Japan to find work in Tokyo. So we could only afford to live downtown, in a low-income area. It was just by the river, and whenever a typhoon came around, we were under water up to, like, here. That's the kind of place we lived in.
I sailed around Europe and lived with the Karen tribe in Thailand for a month.
Of course I've had a problem with people taking me seriously because of my age. People are always going do that because you're less experienced; you haven't lived as much.
I've lived a very nomadic life, which I enjoy.
As I grow older, I become more and more of a Marxist - Groucho, that is. When you have lived two-thirds of your life, you know the value of a good joke.
Never say no to anything, whatever the universe brings me. I've always lived by that.
I have always lived the way I wanted regardless of whether or not it was popular.
I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.
Sam was helping animals long before he was Sam Simon. He lived what he believed; his thing was making the world better and having rights for animals, and every area of his life reflected that.
Both my parents are English and I was born in West Africa, and I moved around as a kid, lived in Bristol, lived in Buckinghamshire and Surrey as a kid, and then moved when I was 16.
I didn't realise I lived in the ghetto until we moved out.
From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.
As a girl, I lived in jeans, and my love-affair with them continues. Since I turned 50, jeans have become something of a uniform, whether it's a slouchy boyfriend fit for daytime or a leaner, fitted jean in a darker denim for evening.