Spending two years on my uncle's ranch in Montana as a young man gave me the wisdom and the thrust to do westerns.
My mother and father, Joe and Theresa Montana brought me along and taught me to never quit, and to strive to be the best.
As a little boy of 3 or 4, I became lame. Something was wrong with my right leg. There are pictures of me being pulled around in a little wagon. The doctors didn't know what to do. So my nanny took me to the miraculous Madonna at Sacro Monte in Varese, the priest blessed me, and I walked.
Chicago is a big town for magicians and card hustlers. So when I was very young, a fellow sat me down and taught me the Three-Card Monte. And that kind of put me in a - pointed me towards easy money.
I'll go to the movies and hear 'Angel From Montgomery' in some film, and nobody ever even told me about it. They don't tell you your stuff is going to be in a movie. They don't have to, so they don't tell you. You get paid eventually.
What I see in Washington reminds me of what I saw in Montgomery when I was first elected Alabama's Attorney General. In Montgomery, corruption was the problem, so I assembled the finest public corruption prosecution team in the country. Their work wasn't always popular with the mainstream media or the local politicians. We didn't let that stop us.
When I went into the Montreal Games, nobody expected much out of me.
No day of my life passes without someone saying the words 'Monty Python' to me. It's not bad.
My mother is British; she's from Shrewsbury. She turned me onto 'Monty Python' very early.
As a little kid when I would watch 'Monty Python'... that would just blow me away because it was just so silly and absurd, but so intelligent, and I loved that.
Because I'm so big, you have to look at me. I think of myself as a monument. But sometimes I like to feel small.
Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture.
My father would take me to the playground, and put me on mood swings.
I have mood swings, but I'm sure people in England have that, too. Me and my friends, we're just a bunch of happy idiots.
It's not that my father didn't love me, it's just that he wasn't capable of consistently being there. His mood swings were gigantic.
I was interested in Prozac from a personal point of view because I can be a bit moody - things do get on top of me sometimes - so I was quite keen to find out what it would do to my personality.
People had told me to try 'The X Factor' for years, but I thought I'd be moody and hate it all. But it's what I needed. I asked Mum and Dad to come to my 'X Factor' audition, and it was the first time that they'd been in the same room in years.
Song-writing is therapy for me. I'm a very moody person, very difficult to live with. There's a lot going on and a lot of contradictions. My life is always one step away from disaster.
You could take me anywhere. You could take me to the moon, and believe me, everybody's going to try to take a trip to the moon to watch me fight.
Any change in my style depends on many things, but it's whatever fits the project. It's important to me to make style changes from time to time; it makes me feel alive as an artist. For instance, with 'Moonshine,' I'm doing all my own coloring. That's a new development!
