I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.
The game is if the orchestra can hear each other, they play better. If they play better and there's a tangible feeling between the orchestra and the audience, if they feel each other, the audience responds and the orchestra feels it.
I did a movie called 'The Savages' with Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, where I played a nurse, and it showed me in a different role from what I played on 'The Wire.' It showed my range as an actor.
I probably prefer Spanish football to the others. It's very technical, the way they play; they keep the ball well, and whenever Spurs have played against Spanish teams in the past, they've always made it difficult for us.
Yeah, it's more like playing what you think is appropriate for the moment. It's not about trying to force any particular style within the parameters - and the parameters we play in are pretty large!
But I've come to the point in my evolution on the instrument where I realize that I can't play the same stuff that just a guitar player or organ player would play - and I need to embrace that in a big way.
In my fantasies, I always wanted to play the ingenue, but in reality, in my bones, I am so used to playing the grandmother that I don't feel safe or even sure that I can do it.
Sometimes when you're playing a very intense character, a disturbed character, you find other layers. That's much more interesting to me, rather than just playing 'intense.' I find it too boring.
Playing live is closer to theatre, although when you're up there on your own, it's quite scary and revealing because you're playing your own songs. It's like a one man show that you've written yourself.
I think when I began, I played distortion more than the guitar. The results of my strumming. Now I play the twang of the string, which is a lot closer to the source of the sound making.
As a young actor, I played a lot of 'exotic' parts and was stuck with the tag 'sultry.' I had to refuse such parts if I were ever to play anything else. It did the trick, but my agent feared it made me harder to cast.
I played recorder in assembly, then I became passionate about the guitar, I don't know why. I started on electric then moved to acoustic - my brother was playing bass in the next room.
My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!
What makes it all worthwhile is we just play for the sheer enjoyment of entertaining people and... make our families and the team we played on and the people watching, proud of what we did.
Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.
I don't do plays without jokes anymore. I've retired from those plays. I think it's bad manners to invite people to sit in the dark for two and a half hours and not tell them the joke.
It is hard to play Blue Suede Shoes. I know everyone has heard it 10 million times, and that makes it even harder to play it, but there's a very laid back tempo on that. I was surprised at how slow it really was.
Before broadcasting for 50-some years, I did TV, played 10 years in the big leagues, won a world championship - and played a big part in that, too, letting the Cardinals inject me with hepatitis. Takes a big man to do that.
Today, you're either very big or you're playing stadiums or you're not playing anymore. You're either popular where everybody will go to a 20,000 seat arena to see you or they won't go to see you at all.
I would listen to Little Richard and Fats Domino and Chuck Berry, and I would listen to how they played their riffs, and after I taught myself that, I taught myself to play my own kind of stuff.
I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.
