I wondered to what extent people remained the same as they'd been when very young; if one peeled back the layers of living one would come to the know child.
Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
I think I'm extremely vulnerable and that in some ways I seek out rejection. Never feeling like you're getting that pat on the back from dad is probably at the heart of that.
I focused on the saxophone ever since high school. It wasn't until my album 'Poetica,' which I recorded in 2006, that I went back to the clarinet. It felt like it was waiting for me!
I'm still very aware of the violence in our culture, more so than other people. I know where it comes from when someone is trying to suppress someone else, sometimes they fight back.
Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.
I think every actor should go back and do theater periodically.
I saw 'The Exorcist' at the cinema when I was quite young, maybe 14. When I went back home, my mum and dad weren't in, so I had to wait for them on the main road. I were too scared to enter the house.
The most important thing about a TV set is to get it back against something and not out in the middle of a room where it's like a somber fellow making electronic judgments on you.
The clothes back in those days were made so much better than clothes are today. They actually took time to make clothes to fit a woman's body. Today they make clothes that fit sizes, so it stretches to fit this and that.
There are times when I think, 'I'm going to get this part. I know I am. I'm going to get this.' And then I don't, and I'm wondering, 'What happened? I went back five times!'
I don't think it's any coincidence that I lost my religious faith and 'manned up' in the same year. I was described somewhere as a lapsed Catholic, which is funny because I'm not going back! I want to achieve things rather than live life in an animalistic way.
I'd been acting in Chicago since I came back after University, and I got a call from my agent saying, 'They're doing this revival of 'On a Clear Day,' and I actually auditioned when the team came through Chicago for the 'American Idiot' tour.
Then I came back and restarted at the UW that fall.
When I went to law school, which after all was back in the dark ages, we never looked beyond our borders for precedents. As a state court judge, it never would have occurred to me to do so, and when I got to the Supreme Court, it was very much the same. We just didn't do it.
If you go back to the '80s, you had a whole plethora of artists, everyone from Madonna and Cyndi Lauper to Prince. God bless Lady Gaga for doing her thing, but she's kind of a lone peacock now. If anything, we have a much more conservative kind of pop world. It's not necessarily about individuality.
I'm excited about going back to 'Today,' but, at odd moments, I'll grit my teeth in anxiety. I feel like a student before the start of school. I've got my new shoes and my book bag, but I'm not sure I'll remember how to do trigonometry. During my maternity leave, I haven't used many words of more than one syllable.
I've seen my friends take someone back after they've cheated because they fit perfectly.
When you're down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you're not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward.
One of my biggest peeves is when the writer hasn't given you enough information to figure everything out. You should be able to go back to the beginning of 'Gone Girl,' after you've already read it and you know everything, and say, 'Check - check - yes, she gave us that information.'
Because I was surrounded by so much negativity at some point that it took me going back and doing stand-up to realize, you know, people really like me.
Tell me the truth - do you think I've lost my Southern accent? I feel it comes back to me only when I'm shouting at fights or at baseball games.
Its the name on the front of the jersey that matters most, not the one on the back.
Comment threads are the new therapy for people. They just go and post the worst things they can think of because they feel bad, and then other people start attacking them, and then they attack back.
My goal from the beginning was, if I ever hit it it big, I would give back. And that continues to be my goal moving forward.
I'll exercise in spurts, usually inspired by a dress that I have to fit into. But once that gown is squeezed into, if I continue to exercise, I get sick or I pull my back. For some reason my body literally rejects exercise.
I had years of partying, and I was kind of surprised and happy I survived it all. Now, being a parent, I look back on it thinking, Oh God, the things you did!
If we could magically transport ourselves back to the young Earth, when it was only a billion years old or two billion years old or three billion years old or four billion years old, we wouldn't be able to survive. We would have a hard time surviving if we were transported to the time when dinosaurs were around.
Back at high school, there was this quarterback who asks me out. He's never paid attention to me before, but now we're on this date, going to see the 'Sixth Sense.' And right before the climax, he leans in - and I'm so excited, because I think we're going to French-kiss - and then he tells me the twist. He completely ruins the movie for me.
All my success seems to come straight away, and it's not until later that I get to appreciate it. Like with 'Popstars,' I won the competition, and now I look back and go, 'God, I was lucky to have number-one singles and albums.'
You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.
I think Europe is going in the right direction and we shouldn't be set back.
You'd have to go all the way back to 1972 to find a version of me who didn't care about theater, who didn't read Playbill and watch the Tony Awards, or get why Bob Fosse's choreography was so groundbreaking that all you need to say is 'Fosse hands' and theater people know what you mean.
In the industry, you do need some ethics - if one film does well, then thousands get work and money comes back to the industry. I guess the bottomline is, if there are two versions, then the better one will click.
Part of the great thing of looking back on how I went from the cattle ranch to the White House was, I was a country music DJ. I saw Garth Brooks perform for free in 1992 at the Colorado State Fair where I met this person who knew about this graduate school program.
My conscious life has all been in Kenya, and it's my point of reference. But going back to Mexico was very formative.
