To this day, I can't understand why the closest man to Jimmy Carter, the key staff guy at the White House, didn't even join us at the White House breakfast meetings where we discussed upcoming legislation with the president. This was unprecedented. People used to say that Jordan was the most brilliant guy around, but you couldn't prove it by me.
I attended seminars where many social issues were discussed abstractly, outside the pressures of an immediate situation, and there I developed certain attitudes which permitted me to face the real thing when it came along.
For some of my young female readers, it will be the first time they will have seen a Punjabi author be successful in the West. Because I'm dealing with topics that aren't always easily discussed, I know they will look up to me, because I would have done the same. So I just want to make sure I do right by them, wherever this takes me.
As a child I always had a sense of social conditions and political situations. I think it had to do with the fact that my mother was always discussing things with my sister and me - also because I read a lot.
I was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher, and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.
I never really mind what people say about me - I am far too unconventional and far too dedicated to being true to myself to let other people's disdain or nastiness upset me for long.
Toughening up, performing masculinity, pretending to enjoy things I didn't enjoy all enabled me to dodge the gender policing of the adults around me. But the way I really was - the swished hips, the Double-Dutching, the hair flips - seemed to always prevail and attract Dad's disdain.
I don't have much positive to say about motor neurone disease. But it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I could still do.
We work crazy hours in Silicon Valley; my wife says we're all kind of diseased in some way. We're totally obsessive compulsive - when we see an idea, we're like, 'let me in, it's so much fun.'
I have a terrifying long list of fears. Literally everything - diseases, spiders... and people getting tired of me.
I would like to find, or I would like a part to come to me that is like the part that Dennis Franz was fortunate to be able to play on 'NYPD Blue,' a sort of similar-looking actor to me, a generic, bald white guy who you would often think of as playing the authority figure. But he was the disgruntled middle-man. That would be a fun character.
A lot of disgruntled Democrats that don't like Obama - old-line Democrats, some of them even conservative - will never vote for a Republican ticket, but they will vote for me as an independent.
I can't disguise myself with a wig and dark glasses - the wheelchair gives me away.
My movies are painfully personal, but I'm never trying to let you know how personal they are. It's my job to make it be personal, and also to disguise that so only I or the people who know me know how personal it is. 'Kill Bill' is a very personal movie.
The pure unadulterated disgust of Washington seems to me to be a really good thing.
Some men are just disgusted with me and think I should have my mouth sewn shut.
I retired from public Business from a thorough Conviction that it was not in my Power to do any Good, and very much disgusted with Measures, which appeared to me inconsistent with common Policy and Justice.
Let me start by saying, I'm utterly disgusted with the former members of the Dead Kennedys.
Basically everything I've done in art, I was in possession of when I was 20 years old. I use a waste retrieval method of working. I'll go back and use something that disgusted me 15 years ago but that I had enough sense to think about. Some artists change dramatically. I see my work more like history being written.
The so-called feminist writers were disgusted with me. I did my thing, and so I guess by feminist standards I'm a feminist. That suits me fine.
