When young people see movies like 'Gandhi 'or 'JFK,' there is an element of romanticization of these powerful people, and young people often feel a huge distance between their own lives and the lives of these social-change heroes. But the Panthers were flawed-up people from the streets, so it's easier to identify with them.
I wish in my own mind I were more definite - that I was absolutely convinced I'd never direct someone else's script, but I keep reading scripts, because I might find something.
I'm very grateful that I don't have to wear heels, because I can barely walk in heels. If I were to skip, it would be deadly.
As a teacher you can see the difference in kids who have parents who were involved. That difference, by the time these kids get to the third grade, is drastic.
I was raised by my grandparents, and they always made sure that I had a pencil and some paper, whether we were in the car or at a restaurant. While they were enjoying a nice meal, I would be sitting there drawing funny pictures of the waitress.
I feel like the books were just written like a movie. You read it and you can just kind of see everything. Before I went in to read with the director, I read the first book and I loved it. I didn't realize how good the writing was. And then I went in and read with Gary Ross, and that was it.
When I was a child, there were not that many vaccines. I was vaccinated for polio. I actually got measles as a child. I got pertussis, whooping cough. I remember that very well.
The history of Chechnya is one of imperialism gone terribly wrong. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Chechens were among the few peoples to fend off Mongol conquerors, but at a terrible cost. Turks, Persians, and Russians sought to seize Chechnya, and it was finally absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1859.
Folk music was out there. Clubs were springing up and they were hot with the college kids.
It was a recession when I graduated, but I was so unequipped to have a job anyway, I don't think it would have mattered if the economy was booming. I think I was expecting bad jobs. But as it went on through my 20s, I began to wonder how things were going to turn out.
Actually, I wanted to be a musician, either a guitarist or a drummer. I guess my dreams were in the entertainment industry, and I landed somewhere along there.
Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?
One of the fun things as an actor is to find a character that if you were to look up a rap sheet about them, you might say, 'I don't really necessarily want to hang out with this guy' or 'I would never be this kind of guy in my life.' I think it's part of an actor's job to say, 'Maybe you could be.'
The bottom line is there are lots of problems that were not created by government. The biggest one is loss of middle class incomes, loss of good-paying jobs which was created by technology and globalization. Above all, when you can move a job to China or India, it reduces wages.
Thus again the Netherlands, for the first time since the fall of Rome, were united under one crown imperial. They had already been once united, in their slavery to Rome.
When I started in this business, everybody said the Democrats were the better communicators because they sounded like social workers, and Republicans were awful because they sounded like morticians. In some cases. they actually dressed like morticians.
Many children work hard to please their parents, but what I truly longed for was good times that were about us, not about me. That is the real hole the Dodgers filled in my life.
I was not proficient in Latin and so was not able to go to Oxford or Cambridge. However, I did enter the first-rate chemistry honours program at the University of Manchester in 1950, where the professors were E.R.H. Jones and M.G. Evans, and graduated in 1953, with the financial support of a Blackpool Education Committee Scholarship.
You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph, but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering.
I remember so vividly playing a scene with Jimmy Stewart. I was in the back of a covered wagon, and we were doing this little talk in the wilderness. They did his close-up first. I was looking at him and thinking, 'How does he do that?' He is not 'doing' anything, and yet everything is there.
Part of my training was learning how to refer patients to cardiologists for heart problems, gastroenterologists for stomach issues, and rheumatologists for joint pain. Given that most physicians were trained this way, it's no wonder that the average Medicare patient has six doctors and is on five different medications.
A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower.
In the 1970s, for all the Stevie Wonders, I'm sure there were five artists that were making forgettable music.
Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
The actions we took in the aftermath of 9/11 were harsh but necessary and effective. These steps were fully sanctioned and carefully followed. The detention and interrogation of top terrorists like Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi yielded breakthroughs which have kept this country safe.
What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.
Van Morrison is probably, at this point in time, my biggest influence as a vocalist. When we were making our last album I had a vinyl copy of 'Veedon Fleece' in the vocal booth in front of me, in the dorky sense. I think there were candles around, which is really tacky, but hey, I needed to channel Van the Man!
We didn't care if we were well-liked as long as the movies were good. We served the movie - that was our master at Miramax. In our second incarnation, the movie is still the master but we're getting the same results in more subtle ways.
It might seem at first surprising that when I studied women and men talking at work, I found that women 'interrupted' each other more often than men did - when they were in all-women conversations.
The King and Queen made the rounds after the film. We were told how we were to respond, and we were in a semi circle in the lounge area of the cinema, they came around after the King, the Queen and both Princesses.
I did 'Love Letter' and 'Write Me Back,' and those were fun albums for me to do because they took me back to music I love.
I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it's clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims.
People always ask me, 'Were you funny as a child?' Well, no, I was an accountant.
There was a point in the '80s when I looked out at my audience and I saw people that - were I not on the stage - they'd sooner slug me as they walked by me on the sidewalk. And I realized that I was way beyond the choir.
When we moved to England in 1986, I was ten years old and I didn't know anything about punk or hip hop. The only words I knew in English were 'dance' and 'Michael Jackson.' We got put in a flat in Mitchum, and the council gave us second hand furniture, second hand clothes and a second hand radio that I took to bed with me every night.
At one time, when I was eight years old, my mother and father, my brother and my sisters - we had to move back in with my grandmother, and there were 13 of us living in one house.
