When you Google someone's name, it matters to me what shows up. Not the lies, but like, did you change lives? Did you do something while you were here?
Music has been so healing in my life, so the fact that my music could be that for someone else is the best gift of my whole career. People have told me that they got married to my music, divorced to my music, and played my music while they were having their baby.
When you have an injury in your forearm, it affects the command of your pitches. I would yank pitches down away, or they were staying up. I'd go to accelerate, but everything would come forward except the ball. The ball was staying behind. When you have an inconsistent release point like that, it's impossible to throw a changeup.
They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that became kind of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers around the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf.
While 'Friends' was about a 20-something population and what they were going through, they were also dealing with issues with their family.
The cars haven't advanced that much since we were kids. When you boil it down, it's still a gas combustion engine.
I had a really generic upbringing, I think, when it comes to viewing movies as a kid. I didn't really know what was out there or what was being tried. I was, like, 'E.T.' and 'Indiana Jones.' Those were the only things I knew existed.
I grew up in a house that was always happy, and my family was always music, music. I started playing percussion very young, because I had some uncles who were musicians and all my aunts were singers.
Early inspirations included Michael Jackson, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Marvin Gaye, Lionel Richie... Those were the people I actually wound up studying just to hone my craft.
I wasn't really terribly familiar with the Beatles when I met George. They were just emerging. They certainly weren't as big as they became later on. I just knew them as a pop group, and that's all. I was keener on George as a man and a person, as opposed to someone in a band.
Coming out as a Barbra Streisand fan was way more embarrassing than coming out as a lesbian. To be an artist of my generation willing to be unhip - artists were supposed to be like cowboys.
I was always a storyteller. I just didn't know it. I never shared the stories I made up inside my head when I was growing up. I never wrote them down, either. But I can't remember a time when they weren't there.
I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.
I had pro offers from the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers, who were pretty hard up for linemen in those days. If I had gone into professional football the name Jerry Ford might have been a household word today.
My assumption when I began writing was that you were never going to make any money. And you were never going to reach everyone. Therefore you had to do as much as you could in the service of something you genuinely believed in. And if you do that and people get upset, well, there you go.
At one time in the history of the Americas, weapons and armies were associated with liberty and independence, and with new opportunities for our peoples. At one time in the history of the Americas, there were liberating armies.
Some of our national heroines were defined by the fact that they never nested - they were peripatetic crusaders like Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Dorothy Dix.
Before the surge started, frankly, after I left Iraq towards the end of 2006, I was worried that we were losing the war. But after the surge, I felt that we succeeded.
The southern colonists were not preoccupied with their own historical significance and mostly did not bother even to make the records of births, marriages, and deaths that they required of themselves by law. Nor did they write accounts of what they were up to for the benefit of posterity.
I had a long time admiration for the Jewish people. Especially with their long time of courage, taking so much abuse for so long. I was only seven years old, but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for.
A lot of people say, 'I always knew Lucky Luciano as a very smooth, very elegant, very powerful man.' All the accounts of him as an older man were that he was very genteel but he still had the look of smothered violence behind his eyes.
I've got no dark secrets, I wasn't beaten up, my parents were kind to me and there was a low crime rate where we lived. Maybe that's where the comedy comes from, as some sort of reaction to the safe, boring suburbs.
If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn't be writing. And I doubt if I should want to.
I grew up in a household where I learned five things from my old man. You know what they were? You're no good. You're a failure. You're not going to amount to anything. Don't trust nobody, and don't tell nobody your business. When I lost to Larry Holmes in 1982, I felt all five of those things smacked me right across the face.
The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either.
Things are old. Parts are old. I'm talking about 'us' parts. AARP-parts. Some of us were born with stronger parts than others.
Would it be a big step forward for the LGBTQI community if there were same-sex couples on 'Strictly?' Do me a favour. Some things ain't politics, and 'Strictly' is one of them.
You will be hard pressed to read another book that understands you as well as 'Leaves of Grass' does. It was made for you in the way that the constellations were made for you. It understands and makes space for your doubts, your love, the guilt and passions of your life and waits for you.
Any time I was at Trader Joes, and the person bagging my stuff would be like, 'Did I go to college with you? How do I know you?' Then it took awhile, and suddenly people were like, 'Oh, you are the girl from 'United States of Tara.'
I met Quincy Jones in Seattle. We were kids together... liked each other when we met and have been close ever since. He wasn't writing when we met - in fact, I more or less started him off to write; voicing, harmony, and stuff like that.
I don't mind snakes. Growing up in South Africa there were a couple a snakes around... and I'm not talking just about the government!
As a CEO, you get sucked into dealing with all the tasks of being a CEO. There's a big meeting, a big discussion, and you get into all the big issues, which is your job. But what CEOs often lose sight of is that it's all about the people who work for you. For every 1,000 decisions, 999 were being made when I was not in the room.
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
My husband and I were very different: I'm spontaneous and emotional; I'm loud - he was exactly the opposite. But you need to be flexible.
Oprah's got good politics, she's got a good heart, and she'll have us all up Jazzercising at six in the morning. This cannot be a bad thing, and reading a book while we're Jazzercising. So America would be better off if Oprah were president.
My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
