Over the years, many producers have come and gone, and screenplays were written and abandoned. It's the Hollywood process. It's hard to get things done.
If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.
My parents landed in Calgary in December 1974, straight from Nairobi. They were immigrants, like many people coming to build a better life. My mom was five months pregnant with me when they landed.
Turning 30 was when my parents both got cancer and were fighting it and beat it, but their mortality started to get to me. Everything wasn't as hunky-dory like it was.
I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife.
It was awesome because we were doing Ramones songs.
Back in those days, in the fifties and sixties, countries had balance of payment's deficits or surpluses, those were reflected much more than today in movements of reserves among countries.
Today's accomplishments were yesterday's impossibilities.
Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?
I remember being influenced by great artists when I was a kid - not to call myself a great artist - but people who I thought were great enough that they really made a difference. And so I would never want to be disappointed by them, and I want to make sure I never disappoint audience.
I never was brought into the league thinking as far as, you know, statistics, things like that. We were really brought into the league in a team concept. Everything was focused around winning.
He and I were about as compatible as a rat and a boa constrictor.
My first record was about childhood. There were a lot of nursery rhyme and fairytale references; it was all about being naive.
In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about.
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
In arriving at a decision in a question of doubt, the apostles in the Acts were guided solely by their sense of the Spirit behind the action, not by any speculations as to consequences which might ensue. And so they found the truth.
The press was all over to get a picture of me. It got to the point where they were all over my house, following me to work... Then Tom Brokaw and everybody else was doing stories, 'A star is born.'
I wanted to be a designer since I was a kid, and I was always attracted to the way rock stars dressed and the way their girlfriends dressed. I always thought that they were the most interesting people.
If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.
If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.
I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.
Men like Hitler and Stalin and their immediate lieutenants cannot plead in defence of their actions that these were justified by the accepted values of that time.
I've been lucky to learn by playing all kinds of roles and watching all kinds of really good cinematographers, actors, and directors for many years before people were even aware of me in terms of audience.
Then, with lots of people doing that without ever looking over their shoulders to see how they were affecting anybody else, it couldn't work, and it didn't work, and it just came to a standstill.
I was surrounded at the time by about a dozen of the enemy, whose clubs rattled upon me without mercy, and the strokes of my sabre were rendered uncertain by the energetic pushes of an attendant who thus hoped to save me.
In my teenage years I was put off the idea of a career in flying, because I'd convinced myself that you had to be a boffin with degrees in maths and physics, which were my weakest subjects.
The head of the CIA, it seems to me, would think long and hard before he admitted that former employees of his had been involved in the murder of the President of the United States-even if they weren't acting on behalf of the Agency when they did it.
We were now, as I before mentioned, upon this St. Joseph's trail. It was evident, by the traces, that large parties were a few days in advance of us; and as we too supposed them to be Mormons, we had some apprehension of interruption.
I heard an Israeli speaking on Palestinian human rights issues, an interesting guy, and he said 'There's no military solution to terrorism. If there were, Israel would be the safest place in the world. But there's no military solution.'
We were the first people who did investigative stuff, who asked occasionally abrasive, occasionally confrontational questions.
You find yourself in this place where you really get to find out what you're made of, and what I found was that when I was at my time of greatest need, there were people who appeared in my life, and helped me through it.
Before Truman Capote, journalism and non-fiction weren't taken very seriously.
Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.
I really feel fortunate to have been around then because there have been good and bad years in rock but the best years were '55 to early '61. I got to see Buddy Holly and everybody else.
We have antiquated policies that were put in place in the 1970s that prohibit us from exporting our crude oil, yet we have allies around the globe asking the United States to provide them with a stable supply of energy.
In Paris, it used to feel like you were living in a museum. As beautiful as it was, it's still limited. But here you have just everything.
