It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer's life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.
I'm always thankful for the stuff I went through and thankful for the people I've met, and I'm thankful even for some of the bad times because all of it helps get you to wherever you are in your life.
There are two ways to go when you hit that crossroads in your life: There is the bad way, when you sort of give up, and then there is the really hard way, when you fight back. I went the hard way and came out of it okay. Now, I'm sitting here and doing great.
People are just trying to work their jobs, raise their families, discipline their kids, and have a good life... Politics has just become like bad weather. And they deserve clear skies.
As foreign attacks increase, it's easy to treat them like bad weather happening somewhere else. It's what we read over breakfast. But when that storm hits your shores, remember this: Wishful thinking never saved a single life. The truth, however, has.
I'm not saying you have to be totally despondent or anything, but... in New York, it's cold sometimes; it rains sometimes; even if everything in your life is great, bad weather can set the mood. You can write songs in New York because it's not always perfect. To write a good song, things can't be perfect.
I love being new places and hate getting there, and have been known to say on multiple occasions that I would give anything from a piece of my soul to a limb to a portion of my life savings to teleport. Especially when bad weather keeps me off planes.
I don't have anything against the 'Honey Badger.' It's just that 'Honey Badger' happened at such a dark time in my life. If the little kids out there want to call me the 'Honey Badger,' they can do that.
Death is easier than a wretched life; and better never to have born than to live and fare badly.
There's now, for the first time, a huge gulf between the artefacts of our everyday life and what even a single expert, let alone the average child, can comprehend. The gadgets that now pervade young people's lives, iPhones and suchlike, are baffling 'black boxes' - pure magic to most people.
Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling.
I've never changed my life since I was 4 and went to the YMCA with a gym bag. I still have that philosophy. In fact, I still have that gym bag.
Preparing food is one of life's great joys, but a lot of times, parents ask their kids if they want to cook with them and then tell them to go peel a bag of potatoes. That's not cooking - that's working!
We all have baggage from our upbringing! That's life!
I took a trip in 2004, a year after the war started in Iraq. I played music on the streets of Baghdad for Iraqi civilians. I'd also play for U.S. soldiers at night when they were off duty in the bars. Then I would talk to people, and I would film them and ask them about their life and the conflict.
My dad was working abroad, in Iraq, and he was a doctor. We used to go and visit him, in Baghdad, off and on. For the first ten years of my life, we used to go backwards and forwards to Baghdad, so that was quite amazing. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East.
I played competitive golf all my life. Then all of a sudden, when I quit playing the game, I've got all this spare time and this energy. And certainly I wasn't ready to pack up my bags and go sit in front of the television with a shawl on.
When I want to make someone laugh in real life (as opposed to when I'm on stage where I tell one-liners), I tend to do prop comedy. For example, if I'm at the supermarket with my husband, I might put 16 bags of marshmallows in our cart when he's not looking, or if I'm trying to make a kid smile, I'll put my glasses on crooked.
When we get there, if we don't find any life on Mars, from that point on there will be life on Mars because we'll bring it there, whether it's germs and leftover urine bags, whatever it is.
I wanted to be a marine biologist my whole life until I graduated high school. And even now, I'm still like, 'Maybe I'll just quit the biz and go to Santa Cruz and study marine biology and have my own research center in the Bahamas.' Yeah, I'm sure it would be just that smooth.
