My biggest change is what is important to me, and what is not. What's worthy worrying about, and what is not. When we're younger, we tend to spend too much time worrying and going over the unnecessary. I'm no longer running the hamster wheel.
You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, hav...
I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.
For me, Los Angeles, New York, where I don't know my neighbors, where people don't necessarily care if they know their neighbors, I'm missing things that truly fed my soul when I was younger, the exchanges between people, the caring and the shared hi...
I got two older brothers and two younger sisters, and we grew up in the country, and we were a little feral. So as long as the car didn't end up in the rhubarb and you didn't get caught for doing whatever you were doing, you were fine.
I had eight brothers and sisters. Every Christmas my younger brother Bobby would wake up extra early and open everybody's presents - everybody's - so by the time the rest of us got up, all the gifts were shredded, ribbons off, torn open and thrown as...
My mum was raised Jewish, my dad is very scientifically minded, and my school was vaguely Christian. We sang hymns in school. I liked the hymns bit, but apart from that, I can take it or leave it. So I had lots of different influences when I was youn...
I have one brother, John, an airline pilot, who is seven years younger. He's adopted, though we're still blood related - he's my cousin. My parents couldn't have any more children after me, so when Dad's brother died, they adopted John, then just a b...
If I have a problem, stuff's going through my head, I feel like using, I usually go and talk to my dad... I decided to get sober a lot younger than he did. He first tried to get sober when he was like 32, I believe.
I'm trying to create a collection of stories - the 'U.F.O.W.A.V.E.' songs are all stories. I haven't really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden's poems when I was younger, and the imagery r...
I have four older siblings and one younger, and all three of my brothers are in the music industry. My dad was really involved in music, too, with the disco, and he also started Radio Caroline and was the one who invented pirate radio, if you like, o...
It was tough at the time but when I was younger, my Dad. I would say my Dad, because without him I wouldn't have been here. I mean it was tough for me because he was really demanding. With him, it was never enough, you know, anything I did was never ...
Apparently, one in five people in the world are Chinese. And there are five people in my family, so it must be one of them. It's either my mum or my dad. Or my older brother, Colin. Or my younger brother, Ho-Chan-Chu. But I think it's Colin.
When I was younger, my dad was making a music video for a band in Montreal. I was goofing around and being a ham. An agent was there and she was telling me, 'Hey, do you think you'd want to go out on auditions?' I was like, 'Yeah, what's an audition?...
If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.
Good diet and exercise are key, but abject fear has its own rewards. And arriving on the first day for rehearsals for 'Spamalot' and seeing all these much younger, much fitter people, who I was going to be on stage with, became a catalyst for cutting...
I endured quite a few injuries when I was younger and had my first surgery on my foot when I was 15. But I love dancing. 'Anna Karenina' was great for me as it meant I could combine the two and I actually went back and did some classes.
My younger sister had kids before I did, and managed to earn a master's degree while raising them as a single parent. Now she's a brilliant second-grade teacher. I'm in awe of her ability to juggle everything and still be a great mother.
I'd love to work with Tarantino, Scorsese, Sofia Coppola - all of them! I love thrillers and action movies. I love good horror films. I watched them so much when I was younger that I find it impossible to get scared.
It's funny, when bands or younger musicians ask me: 'So, what does it take to make it?' Well, first explain to me what you mean by 'making it': Do you want to be a rock star or do you want music to be your livelihood?
I've always been aware of both how extraordinarily normal and how extraordinarily extraordinary my life has been. It's always been important, first to my parents when I was younger, and now very much to me, to live in the world. I would never want to...
