When I was a teenager, I was an umpire for a competitive league for 8- to 9-year-olds. I was really bad at it because I didn't know all the rules, and all these kids were better athletes than me. I made a bad call, and this dad snapped on me. Then he dumped his trash from his cooler, and I had to kick him out of the stands.
You know most of the food that Americans hold so dear - things like hamburgers and hot dogs - were road food, but even before they were road food, they were peasant food.
If there were something that I was going to endorse, it would probably be something like sneakers.
Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, and a lot of American artists were my greatest influences.
In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.
Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.
For whatever reason, Coach Schwartz and I weren't all that close at first. We didn't have that kind of relationship, really. I don't know why, maybe because I was a rookie, but I never felt real comfortable just popping my head in his office and sitting down to talk.
Before even Court Grip, I just wanted to be a part of a brand that I felt that listened to the athlete and really catered to the athlete, and gave us what we were looking for.
Quite a lot of people wanted me to write about my family, I suppose for fairly obvious reasons, and there was always something that would stop me, I thought they were asking me for the wrong motives.
The tragedy of 9/11 and the bloody scrambling-up of the Middle East were painful reminders that the world had not yet reached any end-of-history ideal. But these events mattered less to the assumptions and strategies of huge multinational companies than one might guess.
It was trying to break down the stereotypes and it was the kind of thing where, for the first time, women were on a par and not seen as just objects. Though girls were objectified still.
There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.
As you probably know, this woman I like to call my mother went on tour for her 'MDNA' album. As a summer job, I decided to work in the wardrobe department. All of my friends were getting summer jobs, and I wanted one, too. Mine was a little unconventional but still a great experience and a lot of fun.
My early influences were the Shadows, who were an English instrumental band. They basically got me into playing and later on I got into blues and jazz players. I liked Clapton when he was with John Mayall. I really liked that period.
Both my parents came with their parents during the revolution in Cuba. Both my parents were born in Cuba. They left everything over there. My family got stripped of everything - of their land, of their jobs, everything.
We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.
There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.
When I made my first album, there was no indication that anybody other than my parents were going to buy it.
In America, for a brief time, people who followed Coltrane were studied and considered important, but it didn't last long. The result is that the kind of music I played in the '60's is completely dismissed in this country as a wrong turn, a suicidal effort.
I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.
Some of the best rock shows I ever saw were those appealing to all your senses.
I try to live my life free of regrets, but I do have one style regret that makes me laugh and cringe at the same time. Mum used to dress my brother and me in bright neon bike pants and big baggy t-shirts that were so long you could barely see our bike pants.
The two words, in the American lexicon, are never good. Pink slip. The first time I ever heard it when I was young was when Kaiser Steel handed out pink slips to many of my neighbors and relatives. Layoffs were about efficiency, sales figures for raw materials or refrigerators.
Yes. I was the first female colonel. I enjoyed being that kind of role model for young women watching the show. A woman can be a colonel! A woman can be in charge! Those were new ideas then.
Philanthropy is involved with basic innovations that transform society, not simply maintaining the status quo or filling basic social needs that were formerly the province of the public sector.
I moved to Chicago and I did theater, and then I started writing and I stop acting and I did sketch. You know, I did all of the things that, if you were serious about doing television, don't do.
We were raised to pursue women... Most of the guys I know enjoy the pursuit. But that doesn't mean women should be wallflowers.
If you think of India in the 1980s, there weren't many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad.
I got my head bashed in at a demonstration against the Vietnam War. Police were losing control because they were up against a world they really didn't understand.
We were born and we die. In between, I think we try to live as best we can.
Congress should stop treating veterans like they're asking for a hand out when it comes to the benefits they were promised, and they should realize that, were it not for these veterans, there would be nothing to hand out.
I focused on how these people became how they were.
What's weird is the Hot Boys and the whole New Orleans Cash Money thing had a really big impact on the Bay when that was popping off. I don't all the way understand it. I mean, I know that they were big everywhere and had a lot of commercial success in the mid to late '90s, but they were really, really felt in the Bay Area.
It was far more fun than work doing those shows for all those years, we all loved each other and loved going to work, we all understood how fortunate we were to be in that place, to have achieved that success worldwide.
I wish I were supernaturally strong so I could put right everything that is wrong.
I don't think you could get anything worse than losing a child. I think if my child died, I would prefer it if I were dead.
