Most people, from their second album on, find it much harder to be as spontaneously creative as they were with their first couple of records, and some people only have one thing that they do.
When I was about 9 years old, man, I realized that the real thing was not only to do what you were doing totally great, but to look totally great while you were doing it.
'Emily Rose' was based on a real story, and the real girl died, and there were surviving members of the family, so I took the concerns of that very seriously.
We had some wonderful people raising us, but they still weren't our parents. As you get older, it gets distorted and convoluted, complicated, and, of course, you start looking for attention, affection, affinity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.
In the past, great communicators were great orators, but great communicators today sound conversational, and interrupting is common in conversation. And public discourse is now more about entertainment than enlightenment.
You were always told that if you worked hard, you would get somewhere. But so many people feel they have worked hard and they have nothing to show for it.
If you were ever a ballerina, you know the pain: just to be able to look like it's all so light, but when they take off their shoes, it's all bloody.
The thing is, fairytales were once a very gritty way for people to dialogue about aspects of life.
I'd learned some things. I knew you weren't supposed to hold a good wine at the top - the paper bag falls off.
Whatever my father did were great films. I don't want to remake any of them.
In high school, I had two friends that were suffering from cancer. I would go and sing for them while they were in hospital, and I sang at their services after they passed.
One thing I always really enjoyed about Quincy Jones' production technique was that there were so many layers to every song. Like, one week you'd hear a new trumpet-line, then the next week you'd hear - be hearing a new guitar-line.
Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.
The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting - a zoo, not a natural habitat.
I just wanted to get back to playing attacking football after my time in Italy. It was a little difficult at first but the atmosphere and the fans were just fantastic.
I remember reading the script for 'Dangerous Liaisons' and thinking that I could quite happily spend the rest of my life watching this film; the story and the writing were so wonderful.
Some of the priests from the Seminary were in the nunnery every day and night, and often several at a time.
My dad was an FBI agent. My mom and dad were straight arrow types, and I had a conservative, suburban Orange County upbringing.
Figure skating is theatrical, and a part of it is wearing costumes. My costumes were very over-the-top and outrageous for figure skating. But for me, it's all beautiful. Even when nobody else believed they were beautiful, I felt beautiful in them.
The 1980s was a time of the great recession of interactive entertainment. When Atari fell in 1982, until Nintendo launched its console, video games were an outcast for five years.
Growing up, my idols were Lucky Luke and Jolly Jumper. And Scottie Pippen.
When you're at the highest point of your career at the highest level in your sport, any moment that you have these setbacks and injuries is devastating. You have to start back from zero, and you never know if you're going to get back to where you once were.
I got a call on a Sunday. 'Do you want to do 'The Godfather?' I thought they were kidding me, right? I said, 'Yes, of course, I love that book' - which I had never read.
In 1998 Harry Reid and I had a very close race. It was less than a tenth of a percentage point. We had a reasonable recount. There were a lot of things that I could have pursued at the time, but I just felt that at the time that I should have, you know, conceded the race.
If I were in the government, I would persuade the prime minister to see the beauty in the fact that people see Israel as a haven - from their sadness to their hope.
I can remember when anything further downtown New York than Canal Street was risky and the whole area still looked like a '70s cop movie location; when the original loft-owners were more dash-than-cash, artistic types.
All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing in the bread line - right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.
If innovations were predictable, they wouldn't be discoveries.
'SCTV' was the concept of a group ensemble doing satirical things. 'Saturday Night Live's sketches were broader than ours, more universal.
I read every screenplay that was being sent to the other directors. None were being sent to me, but I was reading what others were choosing and what the best writers were writing.
I had been terrified of Halloween my entire adult life. Loved it as a kid, but the minute I got out of college, there were little kids at my door demanding candy, which, No. 1, I couldn't afford, and, No. 2, if I had candy, it would be mine.
There were about 30 children at one stage, running around like savages at a place called Callow Hill, near Monmouth, which was owned by my grandparents. They lived in the big house, but my dad had five brothers and a sister, and they all lived in various houses scattered on the hill.
In ancient China, self-government was highly developed both in community life and in personal life. The custom of mutual protection and assistance was widespread. The organization and regulations of local self-government were clearly defined and strictly applied. Individual self-control was even more strongly emphasized.
I knew that if we were going to actually defeat Harry Reid, we had to have a candidate who would offer a sharp policy contrast. Someone who would not just pay lip service to limited government principles, but had a solid record of voting that way time and again. I'm that candidate.
My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I'd spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology. The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the 'National Geographic.'
We incarcerate more African-American men today than were slaves in 1850.
