There were some situations where I was giving up everything I had for the band and I just expected everybody else to feel the same way. I realized I was just kidding myself.
I think I take my job seriously, but I enjoy my life and I enjoy my friends, and I never really allowed myself to do that before. So I just kind of want to party with everyone.
I'm just living life. And if that inspires you, I'm proud, but I'm not going to put pressure on myself to be the best person in the world and tell everyone I have vitiligo. If you want to know about it, you can do your research. Either way, I'm not in the dictionary under 'vitiligo.'
I really don't look at myself as just one thing. I'm kind of scattered and like to have my hands in a lot of different projects. It makes me who I am.
I like making fun of myself a lot. I like being made fun of, too. I've always enjoyed it. There's just something really, really funny about someone tearing into me.
I've got no interest in justifying myself to a player of mine.
When I go in the studio, I put myself into a place where I'm feeling something I want to portray, which is often being sad, lonely. But as soon as I'm starting to make something, it's when I'm the happiest. Ever. I think that comes out at the same time, so there's that juxtaposition.
I keep surprising myself with films like 'Mission Kashmir,' 'Albela,' 'Farz,' and 'Bas Itna Sa Khwaab Hai.' All the roles are very different.
I don't know myself why directors are offering me negative roles, although I did 'Yaddein' after 'Mission Kashmir' in which I played a very positive character, but people don't remember that.
I could draw up a list of about 30 artists who I apparently sound like. From Lady Gaga, to Katy Perry to Lana Del Rey. I don't know if it's because I'm versatile or because production affects how people judge music. I can't wait for a time I can just be classed as myself.
I like being a storyteller. I'm bored with myself; I like to write about others. I have a lot of names in my songs: Karen, Margaret, Mary Kay. Even if it's about me, I want to put it through someone else. The music is the soundtrack to the story.
I try to keep myself on an even keel by trying to be as critical of myself as I am of other people. I try to separate my performance from myself.
I am able to get up and dust myself off and keep moving forward. I'm very stubborn.
I am who I am. I'm a cool person, and I don't think I need to sell myself. I'm just going to let the fights keep talking.
A lot of people think the best work I've done was nonfiction - the 'Brothers and Keepers' book. But I think of myself as a fiction writer. And I think, if my work is put in perspective, all the books would be a continual questioning of what's true and what's not true, what's documented and what's not documented.
Even when I was a kid, I always sort of identified myself with Keith Richards and Slash more than the singers of the bands.
In publishing 'JFK: Reckless Youth' almost twenty years ago, I had gotten into trouble myself with the Kennedys. Not because of my portrait of JFK - which was highly laudatory - but because I had described his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, in less-than-flattering terms.
My university teacher and mentor Kenneth Arrow remembers me as a student who asked good questions. Although I had not previously thought of myself in that way, on reflection I think that Arrow was right.
Having travelled to some 20 African countries, I find myself, like so many other visitors to Africa before me, intoxicated with the continent. And I am not referring to the animals, as much as I have been enthralled by them during safaris in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Rather, I am referring to the African peoples.
I would spend a lot of time setting up an accident scene where it appeared that I had seriously hurt myself - hedge-cutter, ketchup, that sort of thing. When my sister happened upon the scene of horror, I would lift my head and pathetically plead for her to 'get Mum'.
