My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it,...
I always felt that I had a mission in life. I thought I was born to play sports. Even now, I still feel that must have been my mission because I came through so many close calls where my life could very easily have been ended.
I started writing 'Leaves Of Grass' when my professional life was falling apart somewhat. I just had a movie implode in pre-production. And so I came back licking my wounds to New York, where I live, and started to write a script about a protagonist ...
When I was a very young author, I knew I needed to build myself a tower outside of Europe. Like when you're a hunter, and build towers to watch the animals move. I knew I would never understand the world without that perspective. I came to Africa for...
I was just doing bits and pieces of acting in the U.K. I'd been in the film 'Breaking and Entering' - Anthony Minghella gave me my start and I miss him dearly. Then I made the trip out to L.A., during one of their pilot seasons, which was when they w...
I remember when I first came to Liverpool, Pepe Reina helped with everything, and he made it easy for me. When I was Atletico Madrid captain, I tried to help everyone. These are the basics in football: you need to create an atmosphere and try to crea...
At school, I'd sing in groups in the locker room or in the bathroom, which was like an echo chamber. The problem is I didn't know how to get started singing professionally. The pool hall was my Facebook. I'd hang out there to keep up with what was go...
I used to comfort myself with the idea of a book with serrated, detachable pages, so that you could read the thing the way it came and then shuffle the pages, like a giant deck of cards, and read the book in an entirely different order. It would be a...
We all came from our mother's womb naked, fed on breast and had Knees to receive us. And so shall we depart naked. When we help ourselves to remember these truths, love and compassion fill our hearts, that transcend into our actions towards people, e...
As someone who came to New York in the 1970s, I was, like so many of my friends, a certified member of what we now call the 99 percent - and I was a lot closer to the bottom than to the top of that 99 percent. At some point during the intervening yea...
Those who are coming from the gutters know that from time to time a piece of us will break off and float back to the floor from whence it came. Wealth can gray your eyes at the edges, money does not make you hover above human qualities, you are only ...
The spark for 'In Praise of Slowness' came when I began reading to my children. Every parent knows that kids like their bedtime stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. But I used to be too fast to slow down with the Brothers Grimm. I would zoom th...
Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate fo...
I've always been slightly self-conscious as an actor, and I guess that sometimes reads as pomposity. Starting when I was 30, I somehow gave off an impression at an audition that had them mentally put me in a three-piece suit or put an attache case in...
The city was a machine of its own, continuously producing. We were constantly pumped out through its assembly line, in different forms or models. We came hardwired with different stories, dark secrets, vices, and defects. Over time, we fail and come ...
With *NSYNC, we shopped our deal for a year in America, sang a capella in everybody's office, then moved to Germany for almost two years and became popular there. A guy representing a rock band came to our show in Budapest, saw 60,000 people get exci...
But last year there were 540,000 people, roughly, detained coming across the border illegally. Forty-five thousand of them came from countries other than Mexico, demonstrating the fact that Mexico itself now is a pathway into the United States for pe...
As you have seen the treachery of love because of me, I have seen my cruelty because of you. But you learned mercy from me, and from you I learned resilience. As you came to understand me enough to know the value I placed on selfless love, I understa...
When I write an email where I outlined a whole scene, it just came out of my unconscious, it comes from a deeper place. The same thing happens when the actors go, take after take, and just get lost in it. When you're in a house, you don't think about...
There came this point where I sat down with all my notebooks and I had to start to write, when I thought: this whole notion of writing for the person who understands nothing, the average reader... He has to die! I can't have him in my head. And so th...
There are more people at Obama's table offering ideas than there were five years ago, but when it came to facing up to the Republicans' threat to force a double-dip recession if they didn't get their millionaires' tax cut, they still amounted to noth...
