Almost the moment he died, they put him in Playboy as one of the greatest drummers, which he was - there's no doubt about it. There's never been anybody since. He's one of the greatest drummers that ever lived.
Maybe you could put it out there that I don't have a built-in dislike of ballads. That was kind of the reputation I had back in the Seventies. But I've come around. Ballads have become something of an acquired taste.
Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.
What the podcast novelists do isn't all that different from what self-publishers do. We put the books out in different formats, but the goal is the same: build an audience and attract a publisher.
Of all the subjects on this planet, I think my parents would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
Critics might contend that putting former private-sector CEOs in the president's Cabinet places the fox in the henhouse. But it's unlikely such executives would expose themselves to the headaches if they weren't genuinely motivated by the call to ser...
Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces.
I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself.
We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
I'll also tell you that five hundred thousand people will die this year of cancer. And I'll also tell you that one in every four will be afflicted with this disease, and yet, somehow, we seem to have put it in a little bit of the background.
If you want to put out a million CDs and sell them and get them played on the radio, and even videos, or whatever, if that still exists, that kind of muscle can only come from a label like Columbia.
I did a gig at a comedy club in Bournemouth where they served a buffet while the acts were on. There was the clang of people carving turkey during the set. If you put comedy and turkey side by side, turkey always wins.
I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.
I just don't think there are any rules to color. You have a small space with no windows? Put lamps in there, make it dramatic, paint the ceiling black. Do something with it. If it's dark, accentuate the darkness.
I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.
Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don't buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down.
I had written in another draft a completely different kind of fight, but they said they couldn't afford to shoot it. They needed a fight scene, though, so I was told to put a fight scene in, but not the one I had written.
That's right, fall in one pit and start over from the beginning! Well, thankfully my buddies practically tied me to my chair until I put in extra lives and I'm glad they did.
Let's put it this way, when I was casting, I cast Viggo first and then found someone who could play his wife, rather than the other way around. So for me he's still the lead character.
It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.
There are probably only a certain number of people who can understand or tolerate how long a job will take and what demands it puts on you. And why should they? It breeds a strange kind of selfishness immersing yourself in a character for so long.
