When you're really young, dating girls, and trying to explain Kiss, they just look at you like you're kind of crazy. I think they got so big in the Seventies and were such a phenomenon - they did the 'Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park' movie, the solo records - some people only know the merchandising stuff.
Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.
My parents didn't really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.
But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the work that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.
I grew up in East Germany, and we were short on technology. So my father was really proud to be the owner of a turntable.
We know with certainty that the Obama administration has re-defined 'militants' to include any military-age males they kill regardless of whether they were actually doing anything wrong. We know with certainty that the U.S. Government has detained and publicly branded as 'terrorists' people they knew at the time were innocent.
Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.
I remember early in my career with Disney, which was a very strange time in the company - there were a couple of executives who were very supportive of me and kind of let me do my own thing.
I'm obsessed with hula-hooping. I do it for 20 minutes a day. I don't use the old-fashioned hollow plastic kind we had when we were kids, but I discovered a new one at Danskin that's smaller and weighted.
The Dolls were an attitude. If nothing else they were a great attitude.
You have to understand the Newark Riots - a lot of people understand that the pain was the initial explosion of anger and alienation, but after that, the response, sending the National Guard troops - a lot of violence was carried out and perpetrated by those who were allegedly coming here to protect residents.
Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.
If it weren't for my breast cancer, I wouldn't be a 'Today' host. After I got better, I talked to my boss about working on the show. Six months before, I'd have been terrified to go in there and ask for what I wanted. But after what I'd been through, how could I be scared of being told no?
I basically sat down for a month, with all the Sun stuff I could find and just picked out my favorites. I didn't think that they were indicative of '54 to '57, although I tried to stay within that period.
'The Sixth Sense' was a very enjoyable, successful movie despite the fact that there were plenty of people, including myself, who saw the ending coming.
I had several publishers, and they were all the same. They all wanted salacious. And everybody is writing autobiographies, and that's one reason why I'm not going to do it. If young Posh Spice can write her autobiography, then I don't want to write one!
When I started to make music at the end of the '90s, I saw myself highly influenced by hip-hop and techno, but I wanted to apply these ideas to something from the local sound; something that had identity, that would say who we were and where we came from.
It's often difficult to slough off all that we've acquired, all the comforts and safety nets modern life provides for us, and realize that in those days, people were living very much on the edge - life was incredibly hard!
In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.
What I'm trying to do is get this message out about self-empowerment, entrepreneurial spirit and true Americanism - the way we were when we changed the world, when Edison was alone, failing his 2,000th time on the lightbulb.
It wasn't glamorous in my day. In the regions, reporters were seen as such low life that they didn't merit their name in the Radio Times. Now people are interested in being famous. I never gave it a thought.
It was a struggle treating Claude Rains as my lover, but we were friendly. It was no great love affair.
The thing is: in order to reach an agreement, to reach that balance, sometimes it is sort of like that old Rhinestone Cowboy lyric, 'There'll be a load of compromisin' on the road to my horizon.' For those of you who were too young, or don't recall the song, made famous by country singer Glen Campbell, it is your loss.
As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.
If I were in a situation where I had to meet a pack of wolves and my family is with me, I'm going to be scared, but I'm not going to hide behind my son to protect me. They're going to hide behind me.
Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.
We were in New York, and we were performing at a morning show. This fan literally ran from that studio in the middle of New York City to our airport, which was very far away. That fan ran all the way there to see us, and we were so in awe of that guy.
I don't think successful musicians were really put on this planet in order to have a great time, pat themselves on the back and say, 'Oh, what a clever boy I am!' I think that, like most artists, we were put on the planet to suffer just a little. And we do.
On the first movie we got good reviews, but we were still dealing with genre stuff. It's going away. Judge the movie - is it a good one or a bad one? We know we made a great movie and it's being judged for just being a good film.
In the great battle of Antietam, still the bloodiest day in American history, Union forces were led by Gen. George McClellan, an incredibly cautious man.
When I introduced a black soldier, Lt. Flap, in 1971, the Stars and Stripes banned the strip. They were having racial problems and thought it would increase the tensions.
I love chicken. I would eat chicken fingers on Thanksgiving if it were socially acceptable.
I love vampire stories. That's why I did the movie. Women especially were taken with that movie-even more so when it came out on video.
During World War II, the pilot losses were staggering. In some bombing raids, as many as 80% of the planes that left did not return.
We'd boil this whisky because we thought that would make it stronger. So we thought we were getting drunk, but in fact there'd be no alcohol left in it.
We were the first urban school system in the country to wire all of our schools for the Internet.
