Every few seconds it changes - up an eighth, down an eighth - it's like playing a slot machine. I lose $20 million, I gain $20 million.
I failed eighth grade twice, and then they moved me up to ninth grade. Then I failed that and dropped out. My teacher would hand me a test, and I'd grade it myself with an F, then put my head down on the desk.
When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.
You have to deal with your emotions and not spike too much on the graph - not get too elated with the highs or too down with the lows.
Realizing this, I knew that the actual space of a room could be broken down and played with by planting illusions of real light (electric light) at crucial junctures in the room's composition.
You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.
If I have to move up in a building, I choose the elevator over the escalator. Because one time I was riding the escalator and I tripped. I fell down the stairs for an hour and a half.
I cannot switch my voice. My voice is not like an elevator going up and down.
I feel it's a responsibility for anyone who breaks through a certain ceiling... to send the elevator back down and give others a helpful lift.
If you're lucky enough to do well, it's your responsibility to send the elevator back down.
Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any value has been added since.
People like Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Marlene Dietrich and Sammy Davis Jr. all walked me down this path of entertainment.
When I watched Ellen come out in '97, my jaw was on the floor. I thought, There are some people who break the doors down, hold them open, and some people who walk right through.
I think Jerry Lee is sad. As a musician, he was far more talented than Elvis Presley. Everybody down in Memphis knows that. Elvis became a movie star because he was beautiful. Not that Elvis wasn't talented, but Jerry Lee Lewis was incomprehensibly talented as a musician.
After studying in Sheffield, I went down to London to do my post-graduate degree at the National Film and Television School, embarking on the movie that would eventually become 'A Grand Day Out.'
As a filmmaker, you put the film out there, and you just want it to be okay. You don't want to let people down; you don't want to embarrass yourself.
Australia can no longer afford to go down the path of confrontation and fragmentation which has embittered and disfigured so many aspects of the national life.
Writing is such a weird emotional thing. It's hard. If you sit down with a plan to write something, it's going to be harder.
Especially with the live, just the way I curve words, it's about expression. It's so emotive, to be able to release these words into a mike. It really emphasizes this insane tingle down my spine whenever I play.
If the concern is security, there needs to be evidence-backed policies to increase security and safety, while maintaining our liberties and freedoms. Policies that clamp down on freedoms and don't increase security empirically need to be outright rejected.
