I was given a thick paperback copy of the 'Guinness Book of Records' when I was 11 years old, and I read it gluttonously, cover to cover, paying special lip-smacking attention to all the incredibly gruesome chapters about the violence of human histor...
Since I was a child, I hated having to deal with my hair. I hated having to change my clothes. As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that's what I wanted to wear everyday.
When I was in first grade, everyone made fun of my name, of course. I think it's kind of a big name to hold up when you're nine years old. It seemed goofy. I used to tell people I wanted to change the world and they used to think, 'This kid's really ...
I have seen ups and downs. I am 10 films old. People say I have changed. But, I don't sense any change in myself. If I had to change, I would have changed in my second or third film.
I don't think people change. I think they definitely mature. But I think the essence of what I am today is the same as when I was five years old. It's just maturity. I've become a healthier, fuller expression of that essence.
Being really good at 'learning how to learn,' as President Bill Brody of Johns Hopkins put it, will be an enormous asset in an era of rapid change and innovation, when new jobs will be phased in and old ones phased out faster than ever.
A lot of the songs start with an image. I was sitting there playing the guitar and I pictured this old, dirty green car, with the window rolled down, in the hot, hot, hot Texas heat, and this beautiful woman I knew when I was a kid sitting behind the...
I love driving. I still drive a 1993 Toyota Camry. I do want to get an electric car, but it's less of a carbon footprint if you keep your old, fuel-efficient car on the road than if you say 'build me a whole new car.'
In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up fo...
You always hear the phrase, money doesn't buy you happiness. But I always in the back of my mind figured a lot of money will buy you a little bit of happiness. But it's not really true. I got a new car because the old one's lease expired.
I picked up the guitar at 12 yrs old - basically, my mother and father bought it for me for Christmas. I played one at my friend's house; when I say played it, I just played around with it at my friend's house. It just struck me as something I really...
I stopped going to Kingdom Hall, the church, when I was 11 years old, so I was very young. They don't celebrate birthdays, you get no Christmas, so it's a very difficult religion for children to get into. And they do a lot of finger-pointing among th...
I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.
I was kind of smart enough when I was young, 14 or 15 years old, to realize that if you're ever going to do anything and step out of the shadow of your own dad - not only in hockey, but in life itself - you're going to have to learn you're Brett and ...
My dad's a bodybuilder. My whole life I've been taught to train the hard way. I believe in earning strength, not buying it. My grandfather raised me old school: In baseball, you work for whatever you get.
My dad was good friends with the Bad Medicine Blues Band - one of the only blues bands in Fargo, as you can imagine! He took me out to see them play when I was 12 years old and I was really inspired by their guitar player, Ted Larsen.
Work ethic has always been stressed in my family. My dad is going to be 80 years old and he still works part time. My mom just retired a couple years ago and she's in her mid- to late 70s.
My thing is you just have to try to feel young and stay young. Obviously you get a little older, but I still want my music to be young. I don't want to sound like an old dad onstage, so you just have to write music that sounds young.
Dad played with me a great deal, as dads should do, and our chief sport was baseball. He bought me a hardball when I was three years old, and he used to sit in a rocker on the front porch while I sat on the grass in the yard, and we'd play catch by t...
My parents got divorced when I was around a year old. My dad was essentially a nonentity in my life until I got to be about 16 or so. My mom was a flight attendant for PanAm, so I moved all over the world. London, Rio de Janeiro.
Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard work - in a way that old familiar death does not.
