I used to have nightmares when I was a little kid that I woke up prematurely and opened all the Christmas presents. And then I would be so relieved when I woke up and I realized that I hadn't done it.
I think it's important not to grow up too fast. I'm 26 now, and I still can't wait for Christmas Day. The inner seven-year-old isn't buried too deeply in me.
Not being a natural songwriter... for me the appreciation of a great song and the writers came early on, growing up in a musical family. My dad got to sing songs by some of the greatest writers of all time, Rodgers and Hammerstein.
My dad loves to cook. I'm half Thai, and growing up, that's all we ate in my house. My dad was very big on the idea that dinnertime and cooking time was also family time.
I did grow up poor. My mom managed to get a job as a custodian at our church, and it was really just a favor for her, and my dad's an electrician - just a blue-collar family, and the house was usually falling apart.
My family actually moved a lot growing up. I really only lived in one place every five or six years, and then we'd move again. That was just for my dad's work.
Well, Mom and Dad are both actors, and I've spent a lot of time watching my mom on stage and a lot of time on set with my dad, so it was very much a part of my growing up.
A mustache really defines your face. My dad had a mustache when I was growing up, and I can still remember when he shaved it, he looked like a completely different person.
When you're a child, the most important thing is to be able to live a life of comfort. You want to be sure that the moon goes up at night and the sun comes up in the morning and dad comes home from work.
'The Simpsons' was about children and married parents; 'Futurama' is about people in between; they're growing up and haven't settled down. Every other cartoon show seemed to be, you know, dumb dad, bratty kids.
When you grow up on a dairy farm, cows don't take a day off. So you work every day and my dad always said, 'No one can outwork you.'
My dad always said I was hard-headed, that it would take something like that to wake me up spiritually, and I guess it did. My heart had gotten so beat up that I didn't have anything left to give.
When I was growing up my mother would say, 'Your dad may have to learn about being a father because he lost his own and that would have affected him'.
Growing up, you always want to hang with your dad - go fishing or whatever. But my dad was always working, so we never really had time for that. I think I kind of learned to accept it.
I grew up wanting to be a musician, but my parents were sure I would starve to death. So, they put me in physics and chemistry. That eventually blew up, and I got into radio.
All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. 'Alas, poor Yorick,' that's about death. And in 'Romeo and Juliet' everyone up ends up dying. The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.
They should invent some way to tape-record your dreams. I've written songs in my dreams that were Beatles songs. Then I'd wake up and they'd be gone.
I've woken up from dreams and the whole song is there. I'm listening to it in my dreams. I consciously have to wake myself up and get a tape recorder because I hear it like a record.
It was funny actually because that was still during the time we were dating. He would get all these calls because supposedly before we broke up, we had already broken up in the trades, in the rags or whatever.
We are trying to make up these other elements by gaining cost efficiencies through our reengineering process and through overt fund-raising activities to better support graduate education.
The collision of mobile and social platforms and the need to build these companies from the ground up - whether it's a game, a healthcare application, an education application - building these from the ground up is what allows entrepreneurial activit...
