Skin cancer became personal to my family when my father was diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma.
I actually had the good fortune to work with Nick Hoult on 'Mad Max' in Africa, so we became really fast friends.
The bulk of my learning - if I may call it such - has come within the past three months, after I became a part of the fragile body of patients who make up an AIDS hospice. Here, surrounded by teams of supportive nurses, attentive doctors, and interns, one gently comes upon his own strengths and shortcomings.
My father's politics and ideas were, to me, unforgivable. He was a Jewish convert who became very anti-Semitic, and I didn't find the anti-Semitism forgivable.
But it then very soon became clear that the response of a war against terrorism, initially conceived of in a metaphorical sense, began to be taken increasingly seriously and came to entail waging a real war.
With 'Wind River,' I became fascinated with the notion of how you overcome a tragedy - accepting it, making whatever peace you can with it - without ever knowing what really happened.
Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.
I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.
We had such a wonderful set of circumstances in Wilmington. Yes, the four of us became famous literally overnight, but we were in a small town and we always knew when people were coming down. We always knew when to behave.
It is because my dad died suddenly that I became an actor. I thought, I'm going to make money doing this thing I enjoy.
The mastery of the turn is the story of how aviation became practical as a means of transportation. It is the story of how the world became small.
It's very clear from Biblical history and Jewish history that Jewish monotheism wasn't developed in an instant, that it became gradually the accepted norm. But undoubtedly, Jewish ancestors were polytheists.
At the age of 16, my father's father dropped dead of a heart attack. And I think it changed the course of his life, and he became fascinated with death. He then became a medical doctor and obviously fought death tooth and nail for his patients.
I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.
I eventually became an actor, starting with doing stand-up comedy in New York and then theater wherever they would let me. Finally, I moved out here to Los Angeles and got on a show.
I grew up in a small hotel with many rooms, so when I became aware of 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,' I inspected all the wardrobes, sure one had to be a portal to another world. I was also a true believer in faeries, and perhaps still am.
So I went to Miami in '74 with my family and while I was there it became obvious that we needed money and we needed to do something, because my family, we left without anything really, and we didn't have any money to begin with.
Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.
The universe is large and old, and the ingredients for life as we know it are everywhere, so there's no reason to think that Earth would be unique in that regard. Whether of not the life became intelligent is a different question, and we'll see if we find that.
But, there was a time when we all had a great thing going but one person just became very uncomfortable with it and he had to try to change it around to suit him more and then it suited no one else but him.
Under Obama, our federal tax dollars can now be used to fund abortion all over the world. With the stroke of a pen, abortion essentially became a U.S. foreign export.
Looking through the list of earlier Nobel laureates, I note a large number with whom I became acquainted and with whom I interacted during those years as they passed through Cambridge.
People became more interested in my love life than in me, and that has a certain effect. You start to feel very empty and worth nothing, you start to become a piece in a board game you never wanted to play.
As a youngster, I had friends who became lawyers and doctors, and I was as idealistic as anybody. When I was in the Army, I read a book by Adlai Stevenson. He said law was as noble as saving a person's life. So at one point, I felt that way, too. But after a while, I said, 'Let me just finish the degree. I'm getting the G.I. Bill.'
When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there.
In 1967, I signed up for the Army, where I earned an equivalency diploma, then went on to join the Special Forces. That was really was the turning point in my life. I became more disciplined and focused. I went overseas and was in combat, got wounded a couple of times, lost a lot of good friends but matured a great deal.
I became a writer in spite of my environments.
As a scientist, my attention became totally focused on global warming some 15 years ago by the elegant and powerful measurements of carbon dioxide trapped in ice cores taken as much as 2 miles deep from the great East Antarctica ice sheet.
We lost our way and allowed greed and excess to become the twin pillars of too much of the financial culture. We became a society utterly absorbed in consumption and dismissive of moderation.
I was sued by a woman who claimed that she became pregnant because she watched me on television and I bent her contraceptive coil.
When I was growing up, my mother would take me to plays and museums, and we'd talk about life. Those times helped shape who I became.
I didn't want to be behind a desk. I didn't want to do a normal job. I had made my mind up. I became despondent prematurely. I had my mid-life crisis when I was 16. I suppose I'd agree with that. But acting has helped me develop a lot in my private life.
I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.
While it is true that many hep C victims became infected through blood transfusions or organ transplants or in other innocent ways, mine was contracted during my college years, when I showed as much care for my personal health as your average suicide bomber.
I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was... nothingness.
In high school, I had a gold 1992 Ford Explorer. It was a gift. I used to have a terrible habit of locking the keys in the car when I used leave the car running to help it start on a cold morning. I think the local locksmith became used to me calling him.
