We never had books at home, but my dad, seeing how keen I was to read, took me to Islington Library when I was about eight and we pulled out two - a Biggles and a science fiction novel. I never got the ace fighter pilot but fell in love with all thin...
I had a basketball net that my dad had put up outside. I went out there and dribbled all day long. I wanted to play basketball. Then I'd go baseball, and then I'd go to football. I remember playing football in a plowed field. I grew up going from one...
Bob Dylan is my idol. Everybody has that person growing up that made them see things a little differently than they did before, Dylan is that guy for me. My dad gave me the 'Blonde on Blonde' album on cassette tape when I was seven or eight. It took ...
My youngest son's pre-school class was recently asked what their dads do for work. The responses were things like, my dad sells money, and my dad figures stuff out. My son said, 'I've never seen my dad do work.' It's true. Skateboarding doesn't seem ...
I think one thing that kids who grow up on farms really have going for them is they have exposure to death and birth in a totally different way. I think it takes away a little bit of the mystery and a little bit of the fear, and I do wish I had that....
Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had...
I didn't have any aspirations of becoming famous or successful; in fact I was scared to death of all that. I remember somebody once said that if a rock musician goes on tour, he goes insane. I was very impressionable and I carried this useless weight...
When I was 11 years old, I was bullied. It mainly started when I moved to California to pursue my dreams of being an actress. Kids back home in Texas, who I thought were my friends, were saying things behind my back. They said that I would never make...
My career was one of just taking it step by step. I didn't know how I was gonna fare on the professional circuit when I qualified. I didn't know whether I was gonna make a dime. I didn't know anything but this one thing: I had some dreams, and I was ...
Most of the things at the zoo don't look like us. We're one design that works. Our chimp pals sort of look like us, so that's a different take on the same basic design. But fish don't look like us, and giraffes don't. They look a little like us, but ...
I run a design studio in New York. Every seven years, I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. In that year, we are not available for any of our clients...
I heard on public radio recently, there's a thing called Weed Dating. Singles get together in a garden and weed and then they take turns, they keep matching up with other people. Two people will weed down one row and switch over with two other people...
I remember my first visit with my guru. He had shown that he read my mind. So I looked at the grass and I thought, 'My god, he's going to know all the things I don't want people to know.' I was really embarrassed. Then I looked up and he was looking ...
My mother had heard the story of Hannah and Samuel, so she prayed that if God would give her a son, she would give that son to God. That was a perfectly appropriate thing for her to do, but as I observe, she did not have to tell me she had made such ...
My closest friend, who died not long ago, is buried near Marx's grave in Highgate cemetery, so I see the gaggle of admirers laying roses at the foot of his tombstone regularly. I have never been tempted to leave flowers there myself. Great theories, ...
I'd gotten the message in my home, starting with my grandfather, that real work, the kind that makes you sweat and gets your hands dirty, is a respectable, necessary thing. But I wanted to write - and writing didn't qualify. Whenever I told my parent...
I don't really mind what people say about my love life or anything like that, but the one thing is that, yes, I do sing and write all my own music. That is something that I hold really dear. And yeah, I made a fool of myself in front of the world, bu...
I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money fo...
I wanted to fly the Millennium Falcon; I wanted to save the girl. In real life, you can't do all of that: NASA's budget sucks. We're still questioning whether we went to the moon or not, you know what I mean? So I said, 'Another great way to do all o...
If I wanted to do TV full-time, 'Breaking Bad' is definitely the type of project I would want to do. But TV is not my favorite thing in the world. I definitely want to focus on film. It's what I grew up loving. It's always been about movies, movies, ...
I do this thing at every party: I go to a party, I stand around for, like, 45 minutes, and then I turn to my wife and say, 'I think we should go home.' And then we leave, and then I wake up the next morning and say to my wife, 'We don't go out anymor...
