I like to think of myself as kind of a sculptor, only I sculpt people.
I wasn't a friendly child. I was reserved and mostly kept to myself. My family tells me they've noticed a sea change in me after I've grown up. But I guess that's natural. Your surroundings, friends, college, etc. do make a lot of difference to your personality.
Trying new things and experimenting is something I push myself to do. It's one thing to have love for all different kinds of music; it's another thing to bring them together seamlessly and make them coherent.
'The Searcher,' as the title suggests, is about someone in search of something, and I have always loved quest stories and so was drawn to writing one myself.
I've been searching for ways to heal myself, and I've found that kindness is the best way.
In my deepest troubles, I frequently would wrench myself from the persons around me and retire to some secluded part of our noble forests.
I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself.
I've always felt I had to prove myself, and now it has become second nature. When I first went to university, I took lodgings with a woman who said, 'What are the chances of you staining my pans?' I said, 'I don't think I understand the question...' and she said, 'When you cook your curries.'
I've never seen myself as a second-class citizen.
Normally, when I'm not performing or stealing, I second-guess myself; I have doubts.
I'm not going to allow myself to second-guess projects. I'm just going to do the ones that I fully love and believe in - that's a real privilege.
Nothing in life prepared me for the way I felt about being a mother. Until then, I sort of felt like a blank sheet of paper. I was always trying to second-guess myself, to be what others wanted me to be.
The thing is, I've been writing for a long time now, trying to be a poet for the last 40 years, and it's still very difficult not to second-guess myself when reading my own work.
I never second-guess myself.
I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my bookshelves and see hundreds of titles which in my memory seem merely mediocre or second-rate. Only occasionally does a novel appear for which I feel a lasting passion, a book that I think could in time become a classic.
But I didn't really enjoy my secondary education that much, probably because I am a very physical person and don't enjoy sitting at a desk all day. I just dragged myself through GCSE and A Levels, so it suited me very much to go on to drama school, which was very active.
Myself, there's people saying, 'He'll never find himself in the halls of WWE.' It's a narrative that's fueled more by secondhand fan myth than what people feel.
I don't have to build up strength; I have been blessed with it. I do lift weights and train hard, but I am a very special individual - a very special man with very special talent and very special power. I can get any man - any man - out of there in a matter of seconds. That is the thing I love about myself.
The usual channels of university studies or secretarial work did not appeal to me. I cherished difficult dreams through confidence in myself.
Growing up, the way that I looked was very important to me. I was always trying to impress people, and when I grew my beard there was a certain freedom, a separation, getting past this the way I looked, identify myself as a spiritual seeker.
