My mom's a children's television writer, so I was involved and around from a very young age. When I was eight, I did my first film with Rachel Ward and Bryan Brown, who are a quite well-respected Australian producer-director duo, and that just changed my whole perspective on what I could do in life and be.
I'm a twin, but only I emerged live from the womb. The fact that I was originally one half of a duo gave rise to a theory, much propounded in newspaper profiles, that my life has been one desperate effort to compensate for that stillborn brother.
Definitely just growing up in general influenced me; Detroit happened to be where I was. I feel like the city definitely has made an impact on my life and made me who I am. Detroit has an unmistakable soul - nobody can duplicate the soul we bring to the game. From Motown to J Dilla to Eminem to anything.
Wave after wave of love flooded the stage and washed over me, the beginning of the one great durable romance of my life.
I started boxing because of my brother. And then I came to admire the all-time greats, like Roberto Duran and Muhammad Ali. I'd say I admired Ali more than any fighter in my life.
We use the term 'fight' very lightly - 'I've been fighting so hard to get my car, I've been fighting so hard to get that job, I've been fighting so hard to get that girl.' But the reality is boxers do fight bitterly to get whatever they want or whatever they need in life, and most of them come from nothing, which is the case of Roberto Duran.
Loving Duran Duran has been one of the constants of my life, but I have no idea what they would sound like if the women in my life stopped loving them. I guess I'll never know. I could claim that Duran Duran taught me everything I know about women, but that's not exactly accurate: I learned it from listening to girls talk about Duran Duran.
The thing about Duran... that gives you the ability to bring all that opportunity back into your life.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Through a huge duration of my life, someone has always picked up after me. And when you're on your own and you're trying to be independent, it's definitely different.
When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.
When you're in your 40s, you become more conscious of life being of limited duration and that you need to create memories and go on little adventures from time to time.
That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life.
Human rights are not a privilege granted by the few, they are a liberty entitled to all, and human rights, by definition, include the rights of all humans, those in the dawn of life, the dusk of life, or the shadows of life.
Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey.
I can imagine no sweeter way to end one's life than in the quiet of the country, out of the mad race for money, place and power - far from the demands of business - out of the dusty highway where fools struggle and strive for the hollow praise of other fools.
Every life has its years in which one progresses as on a tedious and dusty street of poplars, without caring to know where he is.
Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.
The problem of the minimum dwelling is that of establishing the elementary minimum of space, air, light, and heat required by man in order that he be able to fully develop his life functions without experiencing limitations due to his dwelling, i.e. a minimum modus vivendi in place of a modus non moriendi.
Two places are ordained for man to dwell in after this life. While he is here, he may choose, by God's mercy, which he will; but once he is gone from here, he may not do so. For whichever he first goes to, whether he like it well or ill, there he must dwell forevermore. He shall never after change his dwelling, though he hates it ever so badly.
