I do what I do because of Walt Disney. Goofy. Mickey Mouse. I never forgot how their films entertained me.
So I let them be responsible for there particular areas. Then by the time it gets to me that means that there is a problem. I have my eyes open and I need to know something about every department but you don't want to micro manage any particular department.
Soaps taught me the fundamentals of the game. You know, how to show up, hit your mark, how to be on time. That soap opera world is a microcosm of the entertainment culture.
Even the idea of people paying to hear me shouting into a microphone for an hour is alien to me - and I hope it always will be.
The picture of me as a child is that I was always with a ball - that's why I was so skinny: I would miss dinner. Mum would have to leave me some food in the microwave.
I like the Mid Antrim circuit, and if anyone were to ask me to show them a typical Irish road surface, I would take them to the Mid Antrim. It is awesome.
Let me give you a little Mendelsohn 101: I came up in television in the early- to mid- 1980s in Australia.
I never had a plan to be a fiction writer. It's something that happened to me. Sometimes I think maybe it was my spectacular mid-life crisis. Some people buy expensive cars, and I wrote a novel.
It's the typical mid-life crisis kind of thing, where you just stop and wonder, 'Should I go back to university and get a law degree?' I kind of looked around me and thought, 'What kind of idiot am I that I've just spent the last 10 years writing novels? Financially, I'm pretty much where I was when I was 28.'
It was one of those early mid-life crises, really. I started asking myself, 'What is it that I want from my life?' This question kept haunting me: 'Do I want to be a lawyer who always wanted to be a writer, or do I actually want to be a writer?
I grew up in the South, and our way of dealing with each other was teasing, ribbing, making fun and scrapping in the street. Criticism doesn't bother me so much. It actually made me, when I was younger, more aggressive. But you get into middle age, and you lose interest in that stuff. It's not serious.
What drew me to Kazakhstan was a curiosity to learn about life in this 'middle earth' of steppe between the endless forests of Russia in the north and the world's greatest mountain chains to the south.
I was terrified of being on camera. I was worried that whatever I would say, people would assume I'm speaking for every Muslim, every Pakistani, or every Middle Eastern person. That's a lot of pressure. But it also got me excited about what could be done, because I am a representative for people who are underrepresented.
I feel like I have so many middle-aged women who look up to me.
I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.
I'm from a nice, suburban, middle-class family, but my tattoos remind me where I've been.
I come from a middle-class family, where you grow up thinking about government service. But when I went to Harvard, I saw that entrepreneurs and business leaders were just like me. It gave me a feeling that I could also do such things.
I went to a fairly normal, middle-of-the-road public school in a suburb of New Orleans, but it gave me huge opportunities.
I love things that people hate. I hate middle-of-the-road stuff. It never really interests me.
It's important to be a soccer player in the sense of the whole vision - if you put me at forward, I can do it, or if you put me in midfield, I can do it.
