I don't do nostalgia. It just doesn't occur to me. I'm living in the moment, and I don't have that gene.
'Singin' in the Rain' was the one for me. Yeah. I mean, Gene Kelly could just sway and never fall. He'd just sway and sway as he danced.
I was like Gene Kelly, it was called singing in the rain. No seriously, I wasn't really born with a singing voice, but my friends Joe and John taught me how to sing.
Gene Kelly has meant so much to me through the years. I used to dance in my living room in socks and a tee-shirt, no idea what I was doing, but wanting to dance like Gene.
Gene Kelly was hard on me, but I think he had to be.
Gene Kelly was a little tough, and he used to yell at me on the set.
But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.
A distant cousin sent me some genealogy report on my father's side, and it's sort of what I suspected. Coal miners for generations... four or maybe five generations.
When I was first elected I got 50% of the vote in '77 in the general election. In '81 I got 75%. In '85, I got 78%. No mayor has ever gotten that high a vote. So it was not an issue. Except for people who were very hostile to me. They thought they would injure me.
Because I have moderated two general election debates - in 2004 and 2008 - I know better than to carp from the sidelines. I am confident in my accomplishment of having had Queen Latifah portray me on 'Saturday Night Live' both years.
The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.
I was told by the general manager that a white player had received a higher raise than me. Because white people required more money to live than black people. That is why I wasn't going to get a raise.
I had the option of building a career in the U.S. Many of my friends who went at the time did not come back, but for me, building the family business and being with family was worth it. I became a general manager within four months, as I used my education to improve productivity and output.
I don't think any particular painters have inspired me, except in a general sense. It was more a matter of corroboration. The visual arts, from Manet onwards, seemed far more open to change and experiment than the novel, though that's only partly the fault of the writers. There's something about the novel that resists innovation.
I'm glad I get to do characters. It's just like a Polaroid shot of whoever the person is, and to me, anyway, that's kind of what life is like. You get a general sense of somebody, and then we're all good, we get it. We understand each other.
The feminist movement is way bigger than the word. I don't police people on what they call themselves, but equality and a general sense of togetherness are really important to me.
There's a general sense that women are more relaxed and less defensive in comedy than they used to be. I think it's easier than it was but underlying it all there is still a pretty sexist view of women on stage, which to me hasn't changed that much.
For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.
I did feel like they were telling me that something like that was going to happen. Not specifically - not that planes were going to be flown into the World Trade Center or anything like that - but in the general sense.
'The Haters' has some of the generalities of band experiences that I've had - the camaraderie, the grubbiness, the outsized collective ambitions and frequent painful collisions with reality - but very few of the specifics. I guess it was a way for me to take some of my experiences to their logical crazy extremes.
