I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.
I was a huge fan of comedy and movies and TV growing up, and I was able to memorize and mimic a lot of things, not realizing that that meant I probably wanted to be an actor. I just really, really amused myself and my friends with memorizing entire George Carlin or Steve Martin albums.
What is it that unites, on the left of British politics, George Orwell, Billy Bragg, Gordon Brown and myself? An understanding that identity and a sense of belonging need to be linked to our commitment to nationhood and a modern form of patriotism.
When I was in high school at the age of 17 - I graduated from high school in Decatur, Georgia, as valedictorian of my high school - I was very proud of myself.
I call myself a geriatric starlet.
I could totally see myself limping down the aisle when I'm 60, jumping off the top rope and breaking my hip. I could be a hilarious geriatric wrestler.
My mum was a nurse, and her passion was geriatric care. I used to love listening to the old people's stories in her nursing home and picturing myself in their place. They'd say, 'I went to school in a horse and cart,' and I'd just think 'Wow!' I'd picture myself in their place - acting was a natural progression.
I said to myself, where are we living? In the United States of America where you're innocent until proven guilty, or Nazi Germany with the Gestapo calling?
I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.
Every day I wake up and I really try to pinch myself to take advantage of today and to use that freedom of gesture to do what I really like to do.
I'm a wise Latina woman. Whatever, man. Thank God I'm not in politics, because the fact that you have to explain everything - I'd kill myself. I can't take all those little things they dissect. I'm like, 'Oh my God, get a life.' I don't have time for this.
Yes, I would loved to have just sustained myself through my art, but less than one in a billion musicians gets that life. So rather than being like, 'I'm an exception!', like a moron, I thought I'd get a real job.
When I got out of college, I gave myself till I was 30 to invent a product. If I couldn't do it by then, I would just get a real job. And that fear - the fear of a real job - motivated me to be an entrepreneur.
I ended up gettin' a little Gibson amp and a bass, because of Gene Simmons of Kiss. Myself and three other kids would pretend to be Kiss - I liked Gene the best.
I don't see myself getting married again, but if I do, it will be forever.
I would love to do a sitcom. I see myself as an older woman, getting married, and her stepchildren, who are in their twenties, move back home.
In getting older, I find myself becoming progressively more ineffectual in a lot of different ways, and part of that is down to no longer having the youthful feeling that what you're doing has any true impact.
I grew up between Detroit and Ghana, and I had to make friends in an instant. It sharpened my wit, and also, just for my own sanity's sake, I felt like I wanted to entertain myself. So I'm going through all these experiences, and I ask myself, 'Is this crazy? Is it? Wait, what's so funny about this?'
I love ghost stories but I can't really watch them, especially not by myself because then I can't sleep.
I never really address myself to any image anybody has of me. That's like fighting with ghosts.
