I actually went to drama school at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama in Glasgow, so I stayed in my home town the whole time. However, I see more of my friends now than I did then. It's strange.
I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked.
We are living in a time in which movies such as 'Super Size Me' and 'An Inconvenient Truth' have made box-office history, and books such as 'No Logo' and my own, 'The Silent Takeover,' are bestsellers.
I was an only child until I was 14, and there were no other kids around the area really. So I spent a lot of time on my own in the fields or by the lake, with just my imagination for company. I suppose I never wanted to let that part of me go.
From the time that I can remember, I worked to make money - either baby-sitting, or one year wrapping gifts at a department store at Christmas, so I could have my own money.
My dad didn't graduate from high school, ended up being a printing salesman, probably never made more than $8,000 a year. My mom sold real estate and did it part time.
I experienced a lot of loss after his death. I lost my city because of all the paparazzi descending upon us. I actually lost my journal during that time, oddly enough. I literally couldn't hold on to anything.
I have found the right way to deal with my diet, largely through trial and error, but also by having good people around me all the time, and they have given me the right advice for my body.
In my experience with women that I've dated and my wife now, is you have to know what they care about. And even if you aren't a huge fan of it, you still have to have interest in it and it has to be genuine because women do it for men all the time.
I have as many pictures of my vocal cords as I do of my children. I have a great ear, nose and throat doctor, and we look at them - if there's some redness, maybe I'll take a little time off.
I knew immediately that she was going to be in my life forever. I didn't know in what capacity, but I knew that I had found someone who was going to be close to me for a long time. We became great friends fast.
I have great ideas, but the follow through is always really difficult for me. As my kid gets a little bit older, if I feel like I have a little bit more time on my hands, I'd like to get more into developing ideas and writing things.
My sense of loneliness was not particularly great until I reached sixty. From that time on, I would have given an ex-king's ransom if I had been able, in my youth to seduce a lady into thinking of me as a handyman and provider around the house.
I'd like to think I could do something great - a performance like Meryl Streep's in 'Sophie's Choice' - at some point in my life. At the same time, though, I don't want to put too much pressure on myself to be great.
It was a great time to be born, because I got to have my own publishing company right from the beginning, so I made more money than somebody would have doing what I did ten or fifteen years before.
I was an optimist, a great champion of the human spirit. And I lost that for a time. I feel like I've regained a bit of that in the last few years but there was a period of my life in which I had a very low opinion of people in general.
I watch TV on my TV pretty exclusively. However, when I'm on that long flight between Los Angeles and New York, a great way to pass that time is to download movies on iTunes and watch them on my laptop.
I had a great time investigating the pigments of different mutant fruit flies by following experimental protocols published in Scientific American, and I also remember making my own beetle collection when it was still acceptable to make such collecti...
My special thing as a kid was to play dead because I thought I was really good at it. When I was 7 or 8, I even did it in the bathroom with a hair dryer in the bathtub. I realized that I was good at it because each time my mom would scream.
My golf score is really bad. I don't know. I'm definitely not a good golfer. Off the tee box, I can drive it about 275, and I'm in the fairway about 99% of the time. It's my next shot that needs work.
My advice on getting a raise is what everybody's advice is: to become a confident negotiator; but that is so hard. My admiration for women who are good at that is unbridled. Women in general have a harder time talking about money with their bosses.
