I don't think if you asked any of my childhood friends they would say that I had a weird childhood; they might say there weren't a lot of regular rules, the conversations in the house were always very open, dreams were a great thing to talk about, everybody was making something all the time.
I used to design for my body, which was flat-chested with big hips. That's why my clothes were tight on top with full skirts.
Universal was absolutely marvelous about sitting down with me and listening to my input. It wasn't something where they chose a bunch of songs that were best sellers. They did a marvelous job on the packaging. It's a beautiful tribute.
As an only child, I may have been alone a lot, but I was never lonely. My invisible friends were my constant companions.
I used to write stories. Handwriting stories in school were a big deal for me. That's kind of what I did.
The Doors were successful. It was Jim Morrison as the centre and the figure and the spokesman, the figurehead, but we were all into the same thing. That's why we were a band.
What helped me most were my failures and slumps - when I couldn't get work, people weren't interested in me or had written me off.
The cries of the sufferers on the remaining part of the wreck were heard during the night.
It's amazing to me that people have any interest in such a low-level sex scandal. If I were sleeping with a congressman, maybe, but I'm a nobody and the people I'm writing about are nobodies.
I'm not focused on radio or whether I'm going to get all the audiences... all I wanted were great songs that were universal to any listener - Black, White, Green, Yellow; any kind a age difference.
We are just fanatics about using the technology to make it all wonderful. We laughed at the fact that we were having such a great time working this way.
Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.
I may demonstrate the various stages of making a loaf on stage, but they don't end up in the final product I lift out of the oven at the end. If it were real food preparation, I'd wear a hair net, a hat, and rubber gloves - not a pretty sight.
My first big mission for UNICEF in Ethiopia was just to attract attention, before it was too late, to conditions which threatened the whole country. My role was to inform the world, to make sure that the people of Ethiopia were not forgotten.
I think if you go to 'Strength of the World,' a song like that, the chorus isn't that great, but you go into the bridge and other things and the catchier parts and the better melodies we were really focused on.
One day, my twin sister Sidra and I pranked Tyler Perry on the set of 'For Better or Worse.' I made her dress up as me and do a scene as if she were my character Angela. Tyler says, 'Action!' and my sister starts acting. It was horrible.
It would've been hard to do something else, to as it were, run away from the circus and become an accountant.
If the President really wanted to know exactly how Rove and Libby were involved, he could walk down to their offices and demand that they answer him honestly.
In 2008, no one else would ever have believed me that we were going to make a car actually drive everywhere, all the time.
Even the Beatles found it hard to escape their image; they were trapped by it.
My problem was that I was blond. There were no heroes with blond hair. Robert Taylor and Henry Fonda, they all had dark hair. The only one I found was Van Johnson, who wasn't too cool. He was a nice, homely American boy. So I created my own image. It worked.
If we were truly in the studio making a record, it would have been more time consuming, and certainly I would have been more involved in the writing process.
Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated.
I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
What was important to me was entertaining the audience, and whether that meant winning, losing, singing, or whatever it was on the live show we were doing every week, which was awesome, I was game for it.
The press seemed to take some delight that I previously had a 'straight audience,' and set about trying to destroy that. And I think some men were frustrated that their girlfriends wouldn't let go of the idea that George Michael just hadn't found the 'right girl.'
Interestingly, one thing I've found that neither women nor men give up on is the idea of men as protectors. Even in cases where the woman is earning more, they'll often tell me that if there were a fire or something, they would expect the man to be the one to protect them.
OSHA had come in and looked at the channel 5 studios and it sort of had something to do with wrestling, but they found that there were some safety concerns that had to be addressed.
I worked with people I admire; Josh Lucas, who I'd worked with many many years ago on a pilot called The Class of 61 and Kurt Russell, and so there were a variety of different people that I enjoyed working with.
I have seen so many poets who were famous, who won all sorts of prizes, disappear with their death. I write as good as I can and don't try to turn that into some hope for a future that I could never know.
I was a slightly melancholy child and I think films were a way of escaping for me.
And I'd like to believe that's true, you know, kind of showing gay people in this kind of light and - where it's not about that, it's just about the characters for the first time, like those shows were.
It was good for us, I suppose. Those kinds of times produce qualities in us that make us better for having had them. My parents were not getting along. My mother was quite intolerant of friendships that were being developed.
They think that, if we were just smart enough, we'd be able to understand their policies. And I so want to tell 'em, and I do tell 'em, Oh, we're plenty smart, oh yeah - we know what's goin' on. And we don't like what's goin' on. And we're not gonna let them tell us to sit down and shut up.
To be honest, I didn't even know what the Drama Desk Awards were until I was nominated.
Well, clearly, for me in the immediate future, it is grappling, like so many other governors are grappling, with the economic woes of these states. We were all hoping to see some federal relief.
