I knew from the time I was 6 or 7 that music was something I had to do. Growing up, my parents did everything they knew how to do to support me. My dad was always kinda my roadie; he drove me from gig to gig. But I got my own gigs. I was this 12-year...
Once you get everything out of your head about what everybody else is going to think, will radio play it - and I hope they do, I really do - once you shed all of that and just be who you are, that's who I am. That's taken a lot of growing up. I've co...
I get bored. We seem to have been having a little bit more time off this winter than last winter. I'm always itching to get back in the car. It's going to get harder, so I've got to make sure that I'm doing everything I possibly can do to make sure I...
In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in my head and I live in that village, and it's true. When I start writing a book, characters from previous books reappear. All my emotions, my mind, my h...
I have done everything I have ever wanted to do. I have swum with tiger sharks, been charged by lions and elephants. I have been shot three times, chased by crocodiles and, God be praised, I've made enough money that I can continue to do all the thin...
I think you've got good people and bad people in everything you do. If you start making a big deal of it, then it's a problem. It's like in life. We've got bad doctors and lawyers. We've got bad priests! We don't target every priest and say he's bad....
My hair is God's aura. Everything went up when I got home from the penitentiary. One night I went to lie down next to my wife, and my hair started popping and uncurling all on its own - ping, ping, ping, ping! I knew that it was God telling me to sta...
Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn't know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. ...
I've calmed down. Looking back, I was engaged more in dramas than I was in relationships. I've spent a lot of my life being in it for the plot, and I don't do that anymore. I'm satisfied. I'm not competing with myself. I accomplished things I wanted ...
I've obviously used fans - I wouldn't say all my life, because we couldn't afford them when I was young, but from my 20s and onwards we've had to use fans. And I've always loathed them. Everything about them. The way you adjust them, getting them at ...
Loving Duran Duran has been one of the constants of my life, but I have no idea what they would sound like if the women in my life stopped loving them. I guess I'll never know. I could claim that Duran Duran taught me everything I know about women, b...
One ritual is that I don't speak to anyone before I write in the morning. I like to get to my desk before I say anything out loud. And I use everything I dreamed the night before. I work on a computer, but I also work almost as much in longhand on ye...
Humanity is a biological species, living in a biological environment, because like all species, we are exquisitely adapted in everything: from our behavior, to our genetics, to our physiology, to that particular environment in which we live. The eart...
The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He k...
I believe in you and me. I'm like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life -- in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence...
Bono told me how to dance in high heels and he also told me about U2's Glastonbury performance and how everything that could have possibly gone wrong went wrong, including him ripping his trousers on stage. I think he was lunging and his trousers rip...
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Ever...
The lapse of ages changes all things - time - language - the earth - the bounds of the sea - the stars of the sky, and everything 'about, around, and underneath' man, except man himself, who has always been and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The ...
I am a personal optimist but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don't confu...
How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. ...
Writing started out as a kind of therapy for me. I was bullied mercilessly in high school, and I lived vicariously through Kitty. She was everything I wanted to be; strong, smart, witty, and above all else, she didn't care what other people thought a...
