I used to let a lot of unimportant things bother me. I don't anymore. Right now, things are going great in my life. It used to be when that happened, I would be waiting for something to go wrong. Now I don't expect that - if something negative does happen, I'll deal with it, learn from it and realize it is the way it is supposed to be.
I'm more and more convinced that life is a dream. What has happened to me is surely a dream.
Children do not need superhuman, perfect parents. They have always managed with good enough parents: the parents they happened to have.
There's no better way to unplug than having children. Changing diapers is one of the most leveling things that has ever happened to me.
I think that one of the things that my dad was grappling with towards the end was how that shift had happened now and he would go on a book tour and do his shows and it would be you know fulfilling and good, but he wouldn't have the same impact that he used to and it wasn't because people were less interested. It's just because people are distracted by the million different sources of entertainment and information in front of them at any given time.
Rather than engage in the sort of selective retention that so many investors tend to do and pretend mistakes never happened, I prefer to own them. This allows me to learn from them and, with any luck, avoid making the same errors again.
In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States. The novel takes place twenty years after this destruction, with all the stuff that we're dealing with now - a dirty war, the disappeared, the concept of terrorism. Anyway, 911 happened some years into the process, and I was like, OK, I don't have a novel.
Forgiveness isn't about condoning what has happened to you or someone else's actions against you.
No, it's not healed. It happened in Sochi and it's been going on and off all season. It's been bugging me throughout my entire Grand Prix season. Coming here, my foot was bothering me. I knew when to push my foot and when not to. I know that it was all in my head. I knew if I didn't think about it too much, it wouldn't bother me too much. But it's been getting better. Still not fully healed but it's getting much better than it has been.
I think almost everything important that's ever happened was unimaginable shortly before it happened. Good things and bad things: ending slavery, ending child labor, women voting, etc.
I'm actually the last person to ask about school. I kinda ducked out at 12, before all that stuff might have happened. I left school after sixth grade and was basically home-schooled after that.
And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of a Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic? Who can dispute that they did their bloody deeds by claiming to be establishing a "new man" and a religion-free utopia? These were mass murders performed with atheism as a central part of their ideological inspiration, they were not mass murders done by people who simply happened to be atheist.
My most favourite gigs that ever happened were solo, before The Monkees ever happened.
For "Running Up That Hill" we had worked with a drum machine [in 1985]; the basic rhythms of "Running Up That Hill" happened because the whole track was built on a drum machine.
My kids are too old to remember this now but, when they were much younger, I swore to them if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and thats what that was.
I've been doing interviews for years, and in all that time, I've virtually never read one and gone, 'Yep, factually and tonally that's exactly what happened. ' Pretty much never.
I did a smaller gig with an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. In one song, something wrong happened with the drum machine. I tried to cover up the mistake by playing faster and improvising a new song but it became crazy, and I had to admit it was all a mess.
Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.
Don't you see what's happened? You wanted to be in love again. To feel that feeling where a man you hardly know gazes into your eyes and seems to be the only human being who ever understood the real you.
To be honest, I've always had far too much freedom. I had a job when I was 10. I started living on my own when I was 17 or 18. I've earned my own money; I've traveled the world. What would I rebel against? I've had so much freedom, sometimes it was hard. My parents wanted to protect me, but they had no idea how to. I had to learn as I went and make my own mistakes. I went from being totally unknown and never acting professionally to being in a major movie and being very famous. It all happened so quickly, I didn't have any time to work things out. It's been pretty scary at times.