I grew up in a very literate, very independent household where people spoke their ideas and were very supportive of helping each other find their own way.
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.
The Animals were a very separate and dissonant group at the time. We came from different backgrounds, different areas - we didn't even come from the same town, basically.
I think you have a lot of really good artists today. You have your Beyonce, Usher, Nicki Minaj and the like. But our generation, the artists were stronger. You're talking about myself, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Gladys Knight, The Temptations, The Four Tops.
If people weren't watching, I'd be so much more eccentric. I know it makes me sound weak, but rather than make myself happy and wear the silly hat and say, 'Oh, I don't care,' I actually really don't feel like getting made fun of. So I put on something boring and navy and go out and try to disappear.
When you were on stage, you could be absolutely open about your emotions and indulge them and express yourself in a way that - in real life - I wasn't doing.
If a few companies were less greedy, the people at the bottom woud have a lot more.
One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.
I grew up on what everybody called a plantation - but believe me, it wasn't a plantation. It was just an old farm. I grew up with a lot of black people working in the fields, and it was during the Depression between 1930 and the war, so we were all poor - black and white.
I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.
I'm a bit more of a suspense reader on the adult side, but my favorites were the ones I grew up reading.
As I grew up and began identifying myself as a feminist, there were plenty of issues that continued to make me question marriage: the father 'giving' the bride away, women taking their husband's last name, the white dress, the vows promising to 'obey' the groom. And that only covers the wedding.
A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.
I'm a silly little needy person sometimes, and I crouch in a room all alone and think of all the people that I wish were with me.
If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.
We started CapitalSource because large banks were ignoring small to mid-sized businesses, and we saw a big business opportunity as a result.
One of the best things that came out of the Carter administration was the energy policy. The best things in it were renewable energy.
They were so exhausted and seasick and all they could do was crawl up those beaches. And thousands of them lay dead in no time at all. It's unthinkable.
I went through absolute stress and mayhem. I couldn't go out, because people were constantly on my back all the time.
May I say, if you were suddenly put into a woman's body, wouldn't you be slightly interested in your breasts, and why people look at certain parts of you, and why certain parts move like they do?
Well, a sort of epiphany: I was in a great band. And it's very cool to be at 53 and realise that when you were a kid you were in a great band.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Reagan and Thatcher displayed Churchillian magnanimity towards Gorbachev's broken nation. Relations were never better. There was no triumphalism.
Ballet is completely unnatural to the body, just being turned-out... it's not the way your body is supposed to function, so you actually train your body to be a different structure than you were born with.
I heard my mother talking badly of me to people who were talking badly of me in her salon. That's probably the thing that I'm most sensitive of in all my friendships and my relationships. I just... I just can't take that. I'm comfortable with enemies, but I can't take it from friends.
The theme of the party was Neverland Ranch, so guests were asked to come as anyone or anything associated with Michael Jackson. It was all very disturbing.
I grew up in a very modest house. We were poor-we lived on the poverty level. We all got jobs as young kids.
In the 1980s, there were occasions when it made sense to say, 'it is too difficult to maximize the likelihood function, and besides if we do, it will blow our model out of the water.'
It's true: I married my college sweetheart. We were so lucky to find each other at such a young age.
Several times we were stranded in strange places without any money and with our credit cards cancelled - trapped in a hotel that we couldn't check out of because we had no money to check out.
The blessing of having your first project be something as fantastic as 'Girls' is that it gave me room to be selective because I didn't feel pressure to do other things. The curse is that my standards were really high.
Acting in 'Star Wars' I felt like a raisin in a giant fruit salad, and I didn't even know who the cantaloupes were.
I kept looking to do songs that were written years ago and would live or outlive all of us, and the one thing they had in common was Sinatra.
I joined MySpace in September 2003. At that time no one was on there at all. I felt like a loser while all the cool kids were at some other school. So I mass e-mailed between 30,000 and 50,000 people and told them to come over. Everybody joined overnight.
I remember seeing the song in some diners on the selection gadget that plays records at the table while you were eating. We were never told if the songs ever got on any charts.
Yes, and there were changes of light on landscapes and changes of direction of the wind and the force of the wind and weather. That whole scene is too important in Homer to neglect.
I think maybe we were just a little bit overdone. It was saturated. People may have gotten tired of us. We were everywhere, all the time.
