I played football and lacrosse in high school. They wanted me to play football at Amherst, which I did not do because my schedule was full enough as it was. But over the course of my student days, I played pretty much every sport out there.
A critic once described me as an 'amiable beanpole.' I got it printed on a T-shirt.
On the farm, I had chores. I had a calf. We had a herd of cattle in the pasture. We'd go and get me a calf at a cow auction with Amish people, which I would raise. I gave it a bottle every day, in this cute little coop, like a giant dog coop almost. I've always been a big animal person.
I know how to cane chairs - how's that for a useless skill? My mom once took a course and taught me how to do it when I was stuck at home sick with the flu. Now I'm all set if I ever decide to drop out of fashion and join an Amish community.
One of my earliest memories was of seeing horse-drawn buggies with little Amish children peering out at me from the back, their legs dangling as they jabbered in Pennsylvania Dutch, sometimes pointing and giggling at my family following slowly behind them in our car.
There is nothing that would upset me more than my dad being bribed by the press. It's like, 'Just let them run it, then. Don't you give them ammunition.'
My mother and father, with my newborn brother and me in the backseat of the 1938 Ford sedan that would be our family car for the next decade, moved to that hastily constructed Army ammunition depot called Igloo, on the alkaline and sagebrush landscape of far southwestern South Dakota. I was three years old.
I've always studied our empires to empower myself, you know, and to have ammunition against anybody who could try to put me down.
I just spent five, six years sacrificing so much to try and fit into that one ideal, that one small standard, and I was never good enough. And it was just frustration that turned into motivation... That became my ammunition, all the people that told me I couldn't.
The great thing about baseball is when you're done, you'll only tell your grandchildren the good things. If they ask me about 1989, I'll tell them I had amnesia.
I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.
When I ran in Texas, I told the people of Texas, 'if you elect me, I will lead the fight against amnesty.'
That is the best case for Bush; that, among other things, he liberated Iraq. It is good enough for me.
I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.
Getting stopped in the middle of the lingerie section, when you're trying to stock up on a few things, by an older man who wants a selfie is a little bit awkward... but I don't let that get in the way of me trying to do normal things, because that is when I get to interact with people as well. Preferably not amongst the underwear, though.
The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.
It's not easy to date when you're hefty. Besides I like feeling thin because it makes me feel amorous.
Finding the right amp can be a process, especially when you're young and just starting out. When I was a kid, I had to rely on whatever I got for Christmas. Then my mom got me a Peavey VTM 120. I used that for a few years.
I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.
I do a healthy blend of mixed martial arts, dancing, functional training, and swimming. These exercises give me ample strength, endurance, flexibility, and stamina.
