My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.
It was simple reality - most competitive tennis players in my day were privileged, spoiled, entitled and white. Also, many of them were beautiful, fit, tan and of good stock - great big hair and white teeth and long legs. Then there were the rest of us.
NASA didn't give a crap what gender you were or what race you were. If you could do the math, you were valuable.
We were living in Denver, Colorado, and I was teaching high school. I asked the kids to write a short story, so I thought I should write some myself.
I started to have these ideas for films. They were like running images in my head. But I didn't think I could be a director. I just literally didn't think it was a possibility. Then I started to suddenly see films of women.
In a way, digital cameras were like very early personal computers such as the Commodore 64 - clunky and able to do only a few things.
I grew up with the media circus. My whole life. My parents were very calm about the photographers, the fans, and all that. But I understood right away that I hadn't done anything to deserve that attention. No matter what happens, it will be there. I didn't choose it. You just can't take that too seriously. You need to live your life. And stay calm.
In my nothing, you were everything, to me.
I grew up conservative because my mum was a conservative, and when I finally realized what conservatives were, I changed my mind immediately. As children, we tend to copy our parents.
What happens also is that a lot of those people and reporters who vote for Hall of Famers, some of the people who were around when Ray Guy was around, are deceased. And some of the reporters don't remember Ray Guy. He should have been in the Hall of Fame 15 years ago.
I always thought success was from inside, so it was how diversified you were as a person and how cultivated or how much you cultivated yourself.
We were fortunate enough to have several good books detailing the camps and the women. Some were by the survivors. I also got to talk to some of the women who had been in the camp, survivors.
When I was five, we moved to Virginia and lived inside an old fort that was surrounded by a moat. So when I heard stories of American history, I felt as if those dramas were taking place right in my own backyard.
Measures of self-government and a school council, especially for such young children, were a great innovation.
Playing hockey, there were a lot of guys bigger than me, so I knew I was going to get hit and have to deal with it. Gotta hit back.
When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.
It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.
The worst thing I ever wore, really, was rubber pants, but I don't think that was a cliche. They were just way too hot. Rubber doesn't breathe. I look back on my photos, and I dig them. I think I look really cool.
After being nearly eradicated from the lower 48 states by the 1960s, bald eagles were re-introduced to the Adirondacks in the 1980s, and I'm proud to report the view from my home indicates they are flourishing in upstate New York.
Things like 'Lucky Man' were never written to even be a record, let alone a hit record.
Mobile communications and pervasive computing technologies, together with social contracts that were never possible before, are already beginning to change the way people meet, mate, work, war, buy, sell, govern and create.
I'm an actor, so I think without a character to play, a story to tell, a song to sing... there's some suspicion that there's no 'there' there. Like, if I were to just strip down and present myself, I think I'd sort of just... disappear.
I think people were just seriously happy to find a funny woman who does comedy like a man. Because I learned how to do comedy from guys, from watching those Dean Martin roasts years ago.
While I was designing my home, I was living in different houses all around the world, and I saw thermostats that were just as bad as the ones in the U.S., or houses that needed them but didn't have them. I realised that this was a worldwide problem. I thought, 'Let's fix it.'
In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.
I think I might have played a song on piano or guitar in a school talent show. I went to an all girls school, so there were always little things going on, but it wasn't really until I was 17 that I did a proper performance. My first big one was Glastonbury, before I was signed.
Because I had my family, I felt like I could be a bird and fly and experience and do. Because I had roots somewhere, I knew that they would love me no matter what, and I could always go back home and they were going to love me.
We were a religious, practicing, Catholic family - Mass together on Sunday, Catholic schools, and parents who practiced everything they preached. A great gift was their total absence of any derogatory talk about people of any race or culture and we were on a street of many faiths, though no other races at that early time.
Going to the theater is such a joyous experience. My dad would take my sister and me to plays when we were very young, like six or seven years old.
There were loads of plays which were very popular before and after the war, where everybody wore a dinner jacket in the third act and it was in a house that you wished you'd owned with people that you wish you knew. It was life seen through a very privileged way.
My first real kiss was in seventh grade. It was at the movie 'Hardball,' starring Keanu Reeves, and it was with my little sixth grade girlfriend. It was the first time we were alone. Her mom was sitting two rows in front of us!
Well, I think one of the problems with 'Birds of Prey' was there were too many cooks in that kitchen. The studio, the producers, the network, all had very different visions of what that should be. They should have just let Laeta Kalogridis control that. Instead they decided to try to get their hands in the mix.
My movies were the kind they show in prisons and airplanes, because nobody can leave.
As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera.
When I got dropped for the World Cup, there were times I didn't want to play anymore. I didn't want to practise. I couldn't motivate myself. Then I said, 'Look what are the options?' Cricket is the only option. Whether I play happily or sadly, it's still all I have. There are not a lot of things I am good at.
I saw 'Sleeping Beauty' when I was, like, 6 years old at the Mercury Theatre. Then, when I came to Disney, I was in the company of these wonderful artists. People like Glen Keane, like Mark Henn, who were brilliant animators who could really bring these things to life.
