My 12 years in New York were very, very special, the fans were very special, and it's something I will take with me wherever I go and into retirement.
My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.
The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot.
I grew up in the '50s, in New York City, where television was born. There were 90 live shows every week, and they used a lot of kids. There were schools just for these kids. There was a whole world that doesn't exist anymore.
In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about...
I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.
I put the weight on after we were together. I put on about 20 pounds when we got married, and people were flipping their lids. And then I put on more after that, and I've gone up and down since then.
I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.
There were so many specific things from high school jazz band that I remembered: the conductor searching out people who were out of tune, or stopping and starting me for hours in front of the band as they watched.
My brother and I, we were both relatively good-looking guys growing up, but we had our awkward stages, where we were just hard to look at.
Doesn't anybody ever want to talk about anything else besides 'Star Trek?' There were 79 episodes of the series; there were 55 different writers. I was only one of them.
My first year in baseball, there were only one or two reporters. My second year, I got to the Triple-A playoffs, there were four or five. When I came up in 1984, I never saw so many people.
So that was where we were in our relationship.Derwent’s scale ran all the way from wouldn’t piss-on-you-if-you-were-on-fire to would-kill-for-you-no-need-to-ask-twice. I was quite glad to be somewhere near the middle.
Five years ago, people were crying and feeling the Japanese were about to take over the Earth. I don't hear that kind of talk anymore.
That policy was abandoned very quickly, and the military police were tagged with the responsibility of conducting training, which they did. We were not equipped or set up with personnel to recruit new Iraqi guards.
Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained.
Many in the creative professions were nerds in their pasts because they spent so long reading comics and using their imaginations when they were growing up.
I was only a hero by default. The flights were few and far between. There weren't that many astronauts. The moon flights were so interesting and exciting.
When I was at school, you had to choose; there was a lot of pressure to assimilate. You were an Aussie, or you were one of 'the wogs' - which was everybody else. But I didn't want to be in either group, so I felt like an odd one out.
And, as if nature were protecting man against his own ingenuity, the reproductive processes were affected for a time; men became sterile, women had miscarriages, menstruation stopped.
The need for a non-veteran reserve became painfully obvious in the Korean war when many of the men who were being called to serve were World War II veterans participating in Ready Reserve units.
