You want to get better even after people smash you down. You want to be better than you were before.
I used to listen to my dad a lot as a way of trying to be close to him, as well, because my parents were divorced and I didn't spend that much time with him. And I used to put headphones on and listen to my dad talk and sing and I found that quite... bonding with him, in a weird way.
When I was about to turn 50, I went into a kind of personal revision and observed my own priorities and what led those priorities in my life. And many things that, in a way, were profound.
I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies.
When we were recording, sometimes I wondered if what we were doing would even be possible to play live.
There were some older guitarists on my side of town, and I got to know many of them.
When I was in seventh grade, I was a scrawny boy with no muscles, so I went out for wrestling. My intention was to develop secret wrestling skills so that if I were jumped by a bully, I'd shout, 'Ha!' and he'd be on the ground in a headlock.
My grandparents were wealthy; my mom was not. I would walk into these worlds of privilege and then walk back into this other world. My little brother is biracial. So race and economic class and sexuality - these were always issues that were a part of my life.
I was prom king. Which is actually saying I was the sixth most popular, because the five who were on homecoming were automatically disqualified from prom, so of course I have to look at it that way.
I played a real nasty little girl but most of the roles I had up until then were very sweet and very nice.
When the first record came out, I'd go down to radio stations pretty much every day to get the record played, and I would walk in and they'd tell us how much they loved the record, but they weren't sure how much they could play it because they were already playing a girl.
I got along better with the guys than with the girls. Only two girls came up to talk to me. Later I found out they were telling their boyfriends, 'If you talk to her, I'll kill you.' It's always rough with that high school thing.
When we got with George, he didn't care what was happening. He liked how crazy we were looking and dressing. I kinda liked being with George more so at the time, because George let us do what we wanted to do. But I needed both lessons.
The argument we always used to use was that keeping records in the catalog was good for people that were coming new to the music, but I think that was talking over a ten year or fifteen year time span.
There have been so many people who have said to me, 'You can't do that,' but I've had an innate belief that they were wrong. Be unwavering and relentless in your approach.
My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.
Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.
There have been as many investigative reporters on this newspaper working on Clinton's many problems as I can remember there were working on Watergate.
I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.
When I was coming out of depression, I made one random video. It wasn't funny or anything, but just the idea that people I didn't know were watching it made me feel less alone than I'd felt in a long time.
I come from a middle class family, and my parents weren't too supportive of my career choices.
In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.
With so much at risk, you might expect Australia to be at the forefront of the clean-energy revolution and the international effort to cut carbon pollution. After all, the continent's vast, empty deserts were practically designed for solar-power installations.
For us, as actors, and even for the director, it gave us a sense of authenticity to what we were doing because we were talking about Hollywood and we were in Hollywood.
When you're a young child, you pick a totem animal, and you just identify with it to the point of wishing you were that animal.
Those whose lives were lost on September 11 will remain in our thoughts and prayers forever.
I learned more from the one restaurant that didn't work than from all the ones that were successes.
'Con Air' was kind of a turning point for me, in my mind. I never shot anybody in that movie - I never did anything bad - because there were so many bad guys in that movie. I said, 'The hell with this, I'm just gonna be a lovable guy.' I'm like Steve McQueen in 'The Great Escape.'
People who supported Obama felt like they formed a relationship, that they were being spoken to. The way that campaign worked and the way he's worked during his first term is to make people feel like he's grasping their hand, whether it's by tweeting or email, moments after an event, sometimes during an event. It makes people relate to him.
Suffering makes a people greater, and we have suffered much. We had a message to give the world, but we were overwhelmed, and the message was cut off in the middle. In time there will be millions of us - becoming stronger and stronger - and we will complete the message.
I'm just not comfortable with that society stuff. I mean, we were just invited to the White House, but my husband won't take me because he knows I don't want to go.
I'm not a good father and they're not children any more; the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and, because of what the law was, they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers' morality in life and they were not my people any more.
If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us.
That makes no sense for someone to say if they were drafted by their country, that they'd say no.
I began using pseudonyms early in my career, when I was being paid a quarter a cent a word for my work, and when I had to write a lot to earn a living. Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me.
We were doing it under the most extraordinary circumstances, but the first out of the tent in the morning would be David Lean. He said to me on the very first day of shooting, Pete, this is the beginning of a great adventure.
