I never step upon a stage without asking myself whether I will succeed in finishing the opera. The fact is that a conscientious singer is never sure of himself or of anything. He is ever in the hands of Destiny.
Cancer is like a cockroach. It just comes back stronger. I'm tearing apart the immune system of the cockroach and seeing how it ticks. I've opened up my own pathology center.
Imagine if Beethoven had a tape recorder. Then you'd know exactly what he meant. Maybe he meant 'Da da da da' instead of 'Boom boom boom boom!' Who knows?
I never thought I'd go on a show like 'The X Factor,' simply because I didn't have enough confidence to do something like standing on a stage to have opinions thrown at me.
At 16, I would wear clothes that hid my body; now I've found clothes that fit me rather than cover me. I'm not skinny, but I'm healthy, and you have to embrace what you've been given.
My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!
My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I'd like to think I did that.
I really turned into, you know, the real street kid. I was kind of like a runaway, but I had a mother, you know what I mean, and I had a place to stay.
When I first came to Washington, what I admired most was that people were just really, really smart with a tremendous amount of intellectual horsepower and the ability to look at an issue and say something fresh.
People set newspapers on fire; they use them for wrapping fish. The Internet does not have that property. What I don't think we've gotten is that you can make things last longer than in print.
The only way that you can find any semblance of a rule, or make any semblance of your own rule, is to tear up the rulebook. Throw it out, burn it, throw it away, and make your own rules.
Well, pioneers always suffer. I don't care who is the first to embark upon things. For instance, settlers that settled the West, Western Canada and the U.S... they went though hell doing it, but it had to be done.
During my 40-year coaching career at West Point, Indiana and Texas Tech, my teams reached the Final Four on five occasions, winning the national championship three times.
My mouth has a tendency to get me into trouble, but because I'm so small and I take on people who are lager than me. If someone punched me, I'd get my drummer beat them up.
Music has touched me deeply, sometimes to tears. But at the same time it's been life-affirming, because I've been grateful for the fact that I'm alive and human and capable of being so moved.
I never wanted to be part of any scene, I never wanted to be a part of anything, I wanted to do my own thing. Those are the lessons I learned from punk rock.
It makes sense that whatever the topic is, it's more compelling if you can provide the audience with a range of perspectives, and you can cross disciplines. And you don't have to control what people take out of it.
I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
I know that if I went to other studios, like in Vancouver, that those are set up to be as professional and as true, so it's just a different flavour, it's a different sound, but I think both have their place.
I thought about tennis. But the more I thought about the whole thing - lessons, equipment, going to the courts - I said screw it, I'm just going to go buy a pair of sneakers and go running.
You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that's much longer, that's a long essay or that's a video.
