The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looke...
When I was 12 years old, someone took me to see Martha Graham. It was nothing like what I thought of as serious dancing and even then I knew I was having a great experience. It was as if somebody was moving through space like no one ever did before.
I got the travel bug when I was quite young. My parents took me and my sisters out of school and we travelled all over Europe. It was an eye-opening experience and, although I love Norway, I also enjoy visiting new countries. I don't get homesick.
When I grew up in Italy in the 1950s, it was still very agricultural. Food was very important; produce was very important. Everyone made their own olive oil. It took me a long time after I moved here to understand that Americans are much further away...
I was mischievous. I wasn't bad. I stole food so we could eat. My mother didn't know. I used to tell her some man gave me $10 to sweep out the yard. I was like Robin Hood. I took from the rich and gave to the poor. Me.
One of the things that Dostoevsky talks about is that no character is too high to fall and no character is too low to be redeemed. 'Crime and Punishment' began with a person going out and consciously becoming a cold-blooded murderer, and it took 800 ...
My family was going back to England to visit my mother's grandmother, who was very ill. We went up to Liverpool and I met my great-aunt, who was just a force of nature. She was an elocution teacher and a huge enthusiast for theater and the classics. ...
I really love Scrabble. I played it with my mother growing up. We took it everywhere with us. We didn't know then about the two letter words. Who knew that AA, or more controversially, ZA, or QI were words? We were a games family generally.
Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a...
Most of the e-mails I get nowadays are from students who ask me how I got my start. In truth it's from having a really supportive family but also having a good patron who will help you - like financing all those early trips I took.
Advertising seemed almost natural to me because it was a business where you had to inform, persuade and educate. And so from being a junior copywriter to being the creative director of one of the largest advertising agencies in the country took me 4....
Authors should do multiple submissions to agents. I mean, that's the way the business world works and whether or not the industry likes it or not, they can't stop you from submitting to multiple agents and you know what? If an agent misses out on you...
I grew up on my dad's sets, but I was never star-struck or desperate to be famous. I grew up being a worker. It took me a long time to realise that my work ended up being seen by people. As far as I was concerned, I was just in the family business.
Every breakthrough business idea begins with solving a common problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. I discovered a big one when I took apart an IBM PC. I made two interesting discoveries: The components were all manufactured by...
I walked out of the show business in 1968 because I thought that would be good for the family. It took me some time to decide but I wanted to spend more time with my wife and two daughters who were always beside me. I wanted to do everything I could ...
My agent in Sweden used to send off interview tapes but I decided to take it upon myself and come to London to visit casting directors which is when things first started taking off for me. I love Sweden but the industry out here is quite small so whe...
I had the chance to be governor for eight years and I took a year to transition out and a year to transition in, so that's a decade of my life where I pursued my own ambitions and I thought it was time to rearrange my life to focus on other things.
I play knowing that there is somebody watching me out there in the crowd that has never had the opportunity to watch a game before and it might be the only chance they ever to see one, live in person. Michael Jordan once said that in an interview, an...
I have this desire to just while away weeks, months and years. It took me two years to make this record but that was with me trying to condense my process and not disappear down the rabbit hole with all the cool things I've collected. I could take 10...
The thing that is cool about my come up is that I dealt with fame and having money gradually. It didn't happen overnight. It was something that took a while to happen. It was something that humbled me and made me very appreciative of my blessings mor...
I never even wanted to be an actress. I studied mass communication and wanted to study law in Newcastle, for which I even got a scholarship. But by then, I had started modelling. So, I took a year off to decide what to do. But once you are used to wo...
