It almost hurts me to walk down a road and have people grab my hand and ask for my autograph and not sit and talk. When I'm finished I'm not going to be on the front page, but I'm going to be just as happy without the publicity.
The Alanis Morissette tour, everybody thinks that was all sitting around, lighting candles and talking intelligently about synergy and big words. That band was so gnarly. We were such scumbags. Alanis had no idea. We were like Van Halen.
I only started playing piano because I had chickenpox when I was about 14 and wasn't allowed to play my drums for a whole week... We had a piano in the house, so I just sat down and played that instead.
What I know is that if you're going to play half-court, you'd better have the greatest executioners of half-court basketball. If you run, you test the stamina and willpower of the other team. That's what I learned as a player.
In every game, there's three teams out there. There's the two basketball teams and the team of officials. If the two teams are evenly matched, it can come down to number of possessions. If one out-of-bounds call goes the wrong way, that can be the di...
I don't know what it is about me: I am no Rock Hudson, but I absolutely wow all the little old white-haired ladies. They stop me and talk to me all over the country, on the street, in restaurants, in elevators.
After my grandfather's plane took enemy fire, he was denied permission to land at the first available airstrip. In that classic British bureaucratic way, they said he had to go back to your own airbase in the Midlands. They crashed between the coast ...
What I learned about stammering was that, when as a young child you lose the confidence of anyone who wants to listen to you, you lose confidence in your voice and the right to speech. And a lot of the therapy was saying, 'You have a right to be hear...
Sometimes your body language is enough for an actor to know that you're not happy. And you don't really need to say it out loud if you deal with actors you know very well. And I don't think you really need to be explicit.
I was mostly surprised by the rap artists, actually, that were influenced by Sabbath. That was a surprise. But it's very nice and I'm very honored. It's nice to know after 27 years now that what I said in the first place has stuck, and that was the b...
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.
They sounded really professional because they had two Vox AC 30 amplifiers. I also had an AC 30, so when you looked at it, three AC 30s, three Fenders - bloody hell, it must be a great band!
It's like pulling teeth to get me to do photo shoots. And I don't mind doing interviews if they're by phone, but I hate to go sit down and have to meet somebody somewhere, you know what I mean.
If I hear a conversation and somebody says something intriguing, my first thought is, 'Is that a song?' I write all year long, and at the end of the year I pull these forty or fifty things out and say which of these things do I want to record.
My father worked two jobs. He assembled speakers during the day, and then he sold real estate at night and on weekends. And then he eventually, when he was in his mid-50s, became a full-time real estate salesman.
When I was a sophomore in college, my father called me at the fraternity. He told me he no longer had the funds to pay for college. If I wanted to continue, I would have to do it on my own.
I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just lis...
My house is really clean. It's a really big house so I have three ladies who come in and clean it twice a week, but let's just say that, in between times, maybe it's not quite so clean.
I'm from a fancy, well-raised background. We were very well-behaved and not allowed to swear. It's the kind of place where people hide their problems under the rug and pretend it's all perfect. Eventually, you get sick of that.
If you say, 'I listen to pop,' you picture this kind of perfect, colorful, polished song. I want to have that, but when you open it, you see this gritty dark - kind of like dancing your tears away. Disguise the sadness in a pop beat.
I know I have sex appeal, but I've never felt like an actual sex symbol. Fans sometimes think I am. The majority of them are sweet about it, but occasionally somebody weird becomes totally fixated upon me.
