Honestly, I was a good kid but I figured out pretty early that I had a gift for making people laugh. I wanted to entertain and when that happens you tend to get yourself in trouble in class.
I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract.
I went to film school at UT Austin. I learned a lot, and that school's good for puking up all your bad movies early and quick. But ultimately, no one can teach you to be an artist.
I definitely don't subscribe to the theory that more instruments, or more vocal tracks, harmony, or double tracking the voice, is a good thing. People do their early albums very stripped down, then each album becomes bloated.
Am I coasting on some early success? Yeah. It was a good lucky break for me. But I would rather earn my way back again than simply conform to what people are expecting.
I have a folder of scraps and pieces of paper with stuff, ideas for songs from the last 25 years; just little things, maybe early songs that I finished, but didn't think they were good enough.
I guess by taking lessons early on, and really trying to play all the rudimentary stuff, and try to have it sound as good as my teacher. It took a lot of practice, which I enjoyed, and still do.
'Eureka' was very bad timing. The early 1980s: Reagan and Thatcher were in, greed was good, and here was a film about the richest man in the world who still couldn't be happy. Politically and sociologically, it was out of step.
A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.
Like crime, terrorism is a fact of life. I grew up in Israel, where every unattended bag was a suspected bomb; when my family moved for a few years, it was to London in the early years of 'the Troubles.'
There was this real fear in doing 'Square Pegs' after getting such a fast ride to glory on 'Saturday Night Live'. I was afraid that the word would be 'peaks early, fails to live up to promise.'
The Beatles had some juice when it came to distortion, but Clapton was finally able to break through those early studio engineers' fear of overloading. He defined the sound that guitarists spend the rest of their lives trying to get.
One of the things I realized early in my career is that you do what you believe, in knowing that if you don't, you will never like yourself. When you compromise out of fear or ambition, it eats inside you.
It wasn't being an alcoholic - it was going wild. It happened when I got famous. It was like having my teens in my early thirties: blotting out your life, not having to think about anything.
One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.
When is it too late to say it's still early for the Cubs? Try now. Their magic number is 1998, at least until it becomes 1999, but in lieu of a present, they offer you a future.
The Olympic stadium may have been built only in the early 1970s but it was clear for a long time it had no future. For many reasons it is not good enough for modern football and today's fans.
I think that the episodes are like mini horror films really; the characters make bad decisions early on and these things just snowball for them and get worse and worse. And that's what I find funny.
But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.
From the early Seventies to the mid-Eighties, I approached Rome at a snail's pace. Having concluded that God existed, I could not seriously entertain the thought of not trying to be in contact with Him.
Early on, you talk about God because you consider Him to be most important. But later, you realize there are means by which God is known and portrayed.
