I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself.
I got some cash from agents. I've talked to the NCAA. I think that should be legal. I want some money, too; everybody else is making money. I want to go on dates. I want to go buy myself some new suits. I want to buy myself some new sneakers, and I paid the agents back.
I don't plan to restrict myself to rapping in the future, and I didn't want to come off as too aggressive, which is why I thought about changing my name.
I was never a big guy in pubs. I was never the main kind of aggressor or anything like that, but I found myself in trouble because I always had a mouth that would come back with something, and there was just never anyone who could make me be quiet.
I tell myself that some names can be mistakes, like Mxyplyzyk, a store in New York that lost customers because few could spell its name to look up the address. I tell myself that lots of writers agonize over titles, and often get them wrong at first.
I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.
In all of my work I'm trying to create a dialogue, in which I want to provoke the recipients, stimulate them to use their own imaginations. I don't just say things recipients want to hear, flatter their egos or comfort them by agreeing with them. I have to provoke them, to take them as seriously as I take myself.
I spent most of my days in school being a class clown. I never shut up. By the time I was in middle school, I had myself a personal aide.
In the past, I've been reluctant to share any bits of truth about myself or to really let people in on my reality. So I have said some things to throw people off the scent of what's really going on in my life. So I have sort of aided the media in printing these misconceptions, which I regret.
I never thought of myself as unlucky. When you aim high, it's tough to get there unless something really fortunate happens.
I'm pretty critical of myself as far as reaching some sort of perfect bull's-eye or target that I'm aiming for.
Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.
My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.
I was born in 1935, and as far back as I can remember, I was sketching designs. My first subject was an aircraft, which I imagined myself piloting.
Back in the mid '90s, I went to a film festival, and they were airing 'Central Park West' at the same time as this cute little romantic comedy movie called 'French Exit,' and I got to go from one theater where I was goofy, falling over myself, to this kind of evil vixen kind of character.
I have many times marveled at how I could feel so good about myself while eating peanuts in a middle seat on Southwest Airlines and yet feel so condescended to in first class on United.
There's no anger in my act towards anyone other than myself... and maybe airlines.
I don't feel like, unless I have a boyfriend or somebody to march down the aisle with for the fifth time, that I'm 'Oh, poor me.' I'm not going to go running out desperately looking, making myself crazy and thinking that, without that, I'm nothing.
Growing up, I was obsessed with Disney movies like 'The Little Mermaid,' 'Aladdin' and 'Beauty And The Beast.' I was always singing the songs from these movies, so to find myself in the studio with Alan Menken was an amazing experience. In fact, it was a dream come true.
I have few other characters to relate to other than myself. I have enough of a body of work now that the paternal side of Alan Thicke gets a lot of play. I do get a lot of calls to play dads.
