Corbin Bleu was my first kiss in life. I was 12, and he was, like, my first kiss for TV... It was on the lips!
The life of the President's First Lady would not have been for me. And I don't know how I would have been as a housewife.
Michael Jackson's one of my favorite artists of my whole life. In fact, I think he is my favorite. It's one of the first things I fell in love with before I learned about genres and before I knew what was cool to like.
I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'
My dad lost his hearing in the last 18 months of his life, and as a result, I witnessed first-hand the effect that this can have on a family.
As a child I experienced firsthand the severe effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially upon women and children. My parents taught me the importance of education and that it was a key to improving an individual's life.
I find that music makes people just sit and listen, firstly. Then, they seem to interpret their own emotions with the music and it makes them ponder their own life a lot. And then they start to question: Am I happy in my work? Am I happy in my relationships? What am I striving for?
With age, life becomes complex and difficult, often fraught with risk on several levels, from the practical to the fiscal.
Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, 'Chess is life.' I would say, 'Pi is life.'
M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.
I love to watch the movement of light on water, and I love to play in rivers and lakes, swimming or canoeing. I am fascinated by people who work with water - fishermen, boatmen - and by a way of life that is dominated by water.
Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played - skiing, baseball, fishing - there is no greater example than golf, because you're playing against yourself and nature.
If you walk through life in a fighting pose with your fists balled up and ready to strike, someone, someday, somewhere, is going to want to test your mettle.
Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.
Good diet and exercise are key, but abject fear has its own rewards. And arriving on the first day for rehearsals for 'Spamalot' and seeing all these much younger, much fitter people, who I was going to be on stage with, became a catalyst for cutting out the more unhealthy aspects of my life.
It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.
Fitting in is boring. But it takes you nearly your whole life to work that out.
I think that for the five-year-old watching MTV right now, Lady Gaga is going to be an iconic person. In 20 years, the people who are here and talking to journalists will be like, 'Oh Lady Gaga changed my life, Nicki Minaj changed my life.' They'll be saying who influenced them and it will be Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, artists like that.
The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.
The life of an editor is not a glamorous one. You're a fixer; you make things better.
