I'm on Medicare now. If I go and have a big operation, it costs me nothing. It should cost me a little. I'm not rich, but I can afford a few grand if I have to have my appendix taken out. I can pitch in a little bit.
As a teenager, I had been growing away from the beliefs of the church, but one of the main things that caused me to question Christian Science was that the year that I left home to go to college, a boy who I knew in my Sunday School, whose name was Michael Schram, who was 12 years old, died at home of a ruptured appendix.
Every day, I wake up and I say, 'Why... how... did I end up with 1.7 million Twitter followers?' It's freaky to me, every day, but that tells me that there's an appetite out there that had previously been underserved. There's an inner geek in us all, an inner bit of curiosity that people are discovering, and they like it.
I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.
However far back I go into my childhood, nothing seems to me more characteristic of, or more familiar in, my interior economy than the appetite or irresistible demand for some 'Unique all-sufficing and necessary reality.'
It takes me a while to get my appetite going when I wake up early.
People do connect me with James Bond simply because I happen to like scrambled eggs and short-sleeved shirts and some of the things that James Bond does, but I certainly haven't got his guts nor his very lively appetites.
You are damned and praised, or encouraged or discouraged by those who listen to you, and those who come to applaud you. And to me, those people are very important.
At the end of every stage performance, the audience all applaud me for doing my job, but I have friends who work in offices who don't get that.
People pitch me all the time. But hopefully, you'll just go ahead and do it. We are trying to eliminate the need for pitches. I'd rather sit there and applaud. Customers buy products, not Powerpoint presentations.
I've got a friend who's a power lifter, and she's a vegetarian. I don't know how she does it. I want red meat all the time. I applaud the discipline; I really do. I just can't do it. Good for her, but not for me.
In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations - ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies - were not only accepted but occasionally applauded.
To expect for me to be one-way every time you see me is to expect me to be a one-dimensional man, which I've never been. I've always applauded my efforts to be diverse and multi-faceted.
I was very innocent and shielded as a child, so I didn't know a lot about music or dancing. When I was in Primary Six, no one would participate in a talent show, so I decided to go on. When the audience applauded me, I felt euphoric, and I started dancing right after that!
The joy of acting for me is to be able to experience emotions in a safe environment. You can't scream and cry in the street because everybody will look. If you do it on a movie set, you get applauded.
My mother became a casting director, and she cast me in a soap opera called 'One Life to Live.' I was, like, 8 years old, playing a kid who had hurt himself on a skateboard. I had, like, three lines. I did the lines, and everybody in the studio applauded - I was immediately hooked after that. I was like, 'This is the life for me.'
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
My favorite computer of all time? The Apple II that got me started, of course.
From the late '70s to the early '90s, I wrote anything anybody would pay me for. This ranged from articles on how to clean a longhorn cow's skull for living-room decoration to manuals on elementary math instruction on the Apple II... to a slew of software reviews and application articles done for the computer press.
I knew the Apple II was great when I bought it, but as I dug into the details it just completely blew me away the creative artistic approach that the designers had taken.
