When I was a young kid, my pops introduced me to it. He took me to Harlem, 145th and Edgecombe, to watch the filming of Claudine with James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll. That was my first taste of seeing a set and the cameras, and I was bit by the acting bug at a young age.
My dad took me to my first movie. It was 'The Greatest Show on Earth' in 1952, a movie of such scale it was actually a traumatic experience.
There's nothing funny about, 'Yeah, I took a First Class plane ticket and I went to some designer beach and made out with a Laotian slave girl. ' Who cares?
I've always been a mythology lover, and so I took a great deal of inspiration from the tales of various dark gods and popular versions of Hell from the Greeks and the Norse stories.
Being a reporter took me out of myself and that shaped me as a writer.
As my mother said, I never sprang out of bed with a glad shout! My voice needed oiling and then it took off.
If every man took only what was sufficient for his needs, leaving the rest to those in want, there would be no rich and no poor.
The first thing I remember is Alexander Calder - our school took us on a field trip to go see the Calder mobiles, and that always stuck in my memory.
We play some smaller songs larger than they are the record, and vice versa. It took me a while to get used to playing live.
When I knew what I had to do I took all my notebooks, all my manuscripts and ate them page by page so I could take my words with me
Janis Joplin didn't just sing a song, she took it over. She swallowed it whole, then sent it back through her gut and her heart.
It's just coincidental that the acting took off first over everything else.
If you really think back to the culture or just black America before rap music took off, New York could have been Paris.
I took one piano lesson and hated it and then didn't take any piano lessons until I was 18.
'Never Gonna Give You Up' in 1987 was a huge international hit followed by several more, and while I appreciated how lucky I was, it catapulted me into a completely new world and simply took over my life.
After I had the kids, I took a break from work, and all my creativity went into my kitchen. I like experimenting.
What is life? It departs covertly. Like a thief Death took him.
I think that when you're in your twenties you think about your future, when you're in your thirties you're raising kids and you think about their future, but when you get to a time when you are diagnosed with any kind of life altering illness, what did you take away from it? And what I took away from it was how to live in the "now".
It was a positive sign that the conversation took place, it's a sign of the depth of the friendship between Australia and Indonesia.
I was never used to being happy, so that wasn't something I ever took for granted.