I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty much eliminate meetings from my life.
I had gone to Oxford to read music. I had done music all my life, but when I got to college I didn't want to do it anymore.
The more studies that come out that talk about concussions and so forth, it makes me wonder. I wonder, more importantly than the stroke, the impact that concussions have had on my life, particularly as I get older.
I never dreamed I'd be in Congress, or even in the NFL, for that matter. Well, I guess I dreamed about being in the NFL, but I didn't believe it would happen. I'm not the biggest guy. But I guess that's the story of my life.
I grew up loving classic rock music - The Beatles, The Rolling Stones - and then one day I heard 'Baby One More Time' on the radio and I thought 'What is this?' I was eight and it changed my life.
I will say that growing up as a kid in an urban environment and having lived in cities all my life, the one achievement that everyone can look forward to is getting the perfect parking spot.
My lyrics come from my experiences growing up in life, trying to find out and express who I am. That's basically it. I'm not trying to be a prophet or anything like that. I'm just reflecting on life.
Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning. I was much further out than you thought, and not waving but drowning. I was much too far out all my life, And not waving but drowning.
I'm not used to crying. It's a little difficult. All my life I've had to fight. It's just another fight I'm going to have to learn how to win, that's all. I'm just going to have to keep smiling.
The British invasion was the most important event of my life. I was in New Jersey and the night I saw the Beatles changed everything. I had seen Elvis before and he had done nothing for me, but these guys were in a band.
I have high blood sugars, and Type 2 diabetes is not going to kill me. But I just have to eat right, and exercise, and lose weight, and watch what I eat, and I will be fine for the rest of my life.
Even if a story has nothing to do with my life, if I can recognise something of myself in the character and think, 'Oh yeah, that's what I'd do...' Yeah, that's what I look for.
It's an image that the media has given me as a bad girl, and the only reason they gave me that image is just because of the few things that have gone wrong in my life, and also because I grew up living in a trailer.
I would say that I have become more radical as I have gotten older. I started out very radical when I was young, like most people, but I became less actively politically engaged in the middle of my life.
I have little children, 5 1/2 and 1 1/2, and I thought I should document my life, because by the time they're in the mid-20s, they'll be able to say, 'This is what he did.'
I swam very competitively till I was 15, then I swam for fun until I was 18. But athletics remain a very big part of my life. I try to keep that as much in balance with work as I can.
I didn't have anybody, really, no foundation in life, so I had to make my own way. Always, from the start. I had to go out in the world and become strong, to discover my mission in life.
People think my life has been tough, but I think has been a wonderful journey. The older you get, the more you realise it's not what happens, but how you deal with it.
The joy I get from winning a major championship doesn't even compare to the feeling I get when a kid writes a letter saying: 'Thank you so much. You have changed my life.'
I have a special feeling for Blue Hills CC, where I won perhaps the most important tournament of my life when I was 14 - the Kansas City Match Play Championship. It gave me a dream of becoming a professional golfer.
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
