When I was six, right before I started swimming, we went to a national competition here in Maryland and watched Michael Phelps swim, and I got to meet him afterwards, and I got his autograph. Fast forward nine years, and I'm at the Olympics with him,...
What happened in 2008 stopped people in their tracks. People stopped looking at their homes simply as commodities to exploit and starting thinking about how they might personalise that space and make them less bland and more autobiographical, and tha...
Very often, if I know the orchestra doesn't know a piece or it's a new piece, I have main ideas about it. But then we start to play and I never talk about places where they played so beautiful and so clear in the beginning that there is nothing to sa...
When we first started 'The Big Bang Theory,' I would get incredibly nervous because it's such a big show and I was just out of graduate school. I'd come in and have this huge responsibility for the one line that everyone hopes will bring down the hou...
When I was 15, I was scouted at the mall by Elite Model Management. I started to go to New York on the bus in high school, which was about four hours door-to-door from my hometown, until I moved to New York and lived in models' apartments all over.
As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes bot...
I do still read comics since I started writing for DC, but nowhere near as much as I used to, and I'm finding now that it's becoming harder to read comics as a consumer, so I think I'll have to make the call there and stop reading them.
To be fair, she called this morning. I stared at the phone. Circled it on my bed. And, eventually, it stopped ringing. If it had been important, she would’ve called back, right? That was the line of thought that ran through my head until halfway th...
'Miracle at St. Anna.' I was challenged by Spike Lee. When he offered me the film, he looked me square in the eye and said, 'You start this film off and you end this film. I don't want a dry eye in the theatre. Can you pull that off?' He was dead ser...
Once I have a hook I think has potential - enough to spin out more than a hundred thousand words, then I start turning my attention to characters. Who are these people? Why did this thing happen to them? But the hook always comes first.
Many survivors insist they’re not courageous: ‘If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.’ ‘If I were courageous, I wouldn't be scared’... Most of us have it mixed up. You don’t start with courage and then face fear. You become ...
As a kid, we would drive up and down 77 North - that's our highway - there would be office buildings on the side of the highway and I'd be like, that's what my house is going to look like when I get older. I'm going to start making my house look like...
Frustration is your belief that things should be different than they are. So, when frustrated, ask yourself 'what should be different?'. In the end, you will find things are the way they are, as a result of your choices. Accept responsibility and sta...
In all our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the pictures we build of people's character, our unconscious mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us - usually spotty - and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture ...
Rock & roll is so great, people should start dying for it. You don't understand. The music gave you back your beat so you could dream...The people just have to die for the music. People are dying for everything else, so why not for music? Die for it....
Wimbledon 2014 will be my last slam. To be honest, I am already starting to miss professional tennis, having played at the highest level for two decades. It is what has given me my identity, and I will miss every bit of the action. The thought that I...
I felt vaguely outraged that such a bad person had such a good car. Because the car was the culmination of a thousand-odd years of scientific advancement. But the guy was a dick. I wondered when that had happened; that we had started making better ma...
I suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be sure. It was heterosexist in the sense that it took the heterosexual orientation as the norm from which to start as the given...
Someone asked me about what's it like managing 2.2 million associates, and I said, 'When they're Wal-Mart associates, it's not all that hard because of the quality and the depth of our talent.' I'm really proud of the fact that 70% of the managers in...
The turning point for me was when the Supreme Court installed Bush in 2000, even though he got half a million votes less nationally than Gore. It was nothing more than a bloodless coup and that's when I really started paying attention.
I started getting back into buying old analog gear while we were recording. Lots of old drum machines and synths. It wasn't a conscious thing. I didn't consider myself a collector, but boxes of vintage gear would turn up virtually every day.
