I had been playing since I was 2 years old, never remembering a life without music, always playing everything naturally and mostly by ear, and all the grownups wanted were more scales and drudgery out of me.
I don't know about friends, but what time I spent with The Beatles they were very courteous to me.
And so, when I was a young writer I always worked hard on imagery, and I knew that the roots of imagery were the senses - and that if my readers could feel, taste and see what I was talking about, I would be able to tell them a story.
Yes, I'm a Judeo-Christian. Jesus and Moses are in my heart, and... both of them were independents, by the way.
I believe I am a person with unusual talents. I think I'd be a liar or stupid if I were to deny that.
When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar.
I couldn't sleep for nights on end, as my brain felt like there were thoughts colliding within it; I obsessed over small details, from saving pennies and polishing each one of them to washing my clothing over and over in the washing machine.
I grew up in Brooklyn, in what I now know was poverty. Sharing a tiny bedroom with my two brothers, eating government cheese and passing down sneakers until they were unpassable... I simply thought the whole world lived as such, especially in pre-gentrified Williamsburg of the 1980s.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
I think the kids in school that laughed at the clothes that we wore and the house that we lived in, and then my mother had to cut hair... I think that was a good motivator. Every time they laughed at me, they just built a fire, and there was only one way to put it out - to try and show 'em I was as good as they were.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
This is my third ABC show over the last four years, so we were afraid that nobody would find it. ABC was really struggling and so we just weren't very confident that it would find an audience.
We spent most of our life almost like street rats just running around the street until we were ten years old.
As time goes by, you seem to weed out the things that were making your life hard.
If priests were allowed to marry, if this would be an optional thing, and if he could have wife and children, he would certainly have less temptation to satisfy certain sexual impulses with minors.
If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.
If you think about stuff that happened when you were young, it stays with you forever.
Unfortunately, I was making comedies in my 20s, but other people didn't realize they were comedies.
My grandparents from the old country, Latvia, were all musical on my father's side.
I would take plays and I would cut out all the other dialogue and make long monologues because I felt the other kids weren't taking it as seriously as I did.
I always wore the highest heels possible, because the other women on the show were tall.
I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.
Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.
We knew what we were up against, but we were going to go down fighting. Hopefully people back home remember that we got this far. We've got nothing to be ashamed about.
I was a tomboy and most of my close friends were male.
Paradoxically, no such embargo exists for the drugs and therapies that have revolutionized the treatment of serious diseases although many of them were created with the same technologies.
I don't want to give this impression that I grew up in Liverpool in a cardboard box in abject poverty, but that didn't mean there weren't anxieties in my childhood about money.
My parents were Northern Ireland Labour party people. We read the 'Guardian' and the 'New Statesman,' listened to the BBC. The house was full of books. We didn't get a television until 'That Was The Week That Was' started. There was nothing to do but read.
Once I got a record contract, and I took my songs which weren't quite finished, or maybe they were a good idea, maybe they weren't. I took them into the studio and developed them. They came to life and they evolved... and they're great.
Feminists were psyched that I had armpit hair.
I've been doing everything I can to reach out and understand why people voted against me. They were trying to send a message. I have to be more sensitive in the way I express myself, and I have to be more thoughtful in the positions I take.
I was already devouring literature and I was the ripe old age of 15 when I decided to be an actor. I just thought plays were the most fantastic way of expressing life. I thought I'd discovered Shakespeare - 'hey, there's a new guy in town, don't know if anyone's read him.' I was just excited about the whole thing, from day one.
World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.
I've never canceled a subscription to a newspaper because of bad cartoons or editorials. If that were the case, I wouldn't have any newspapers or magazines to read.
Any therapist will tell you that when you're ready, you will come out. To be outed means you weren't ready.
