My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.
Irish fathers still have certain responsibilities, and by the time my two daughters turned seven, they could swim, ride a bike, sing at least one part of a Woody Guthrie song, and recite all of W. B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.'
Creating problems is easy. We do it all the time. Finding solutions, ones that last and produce good results, requires guts and care.
As an actor, you always have to reinvent yourself or you end up in the gutter somewhere. It's my job to always change people's minds. I've known that for a long time and I've had to do it.
Those small things, like giving a hug to man, I try to avoid it. Because I can see the situation is coming, and I try to prepare. But I remember the first time I did it, I was 16, and I was at the gymnasium, and it was a cosmopolitan thing, an international thing, a modern thing, but I never felt at ease with it at all.
As a gymnast, I've always compartmentalized my life, which is a blessing and a curse. But over time, I've learned that my sport doesn't fully define me, and I think that's where a lot of the joy in my routines comes from now: I'm not compartmentalizing as much, and I know who I am beyond my sport.
I worked hard in gymnastics since the time I was six years old until I retired at 23 years of age.
I'm out here to represent the gingers, the gypsies, and the outcasts. Because I am all of the above, and I'm all about having a great time.
It's not often that the idea of continuing something for a potentially long period of time sounds exciting to me, because I really am a gypsy by nature.
Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all the time thing. You don't win once in a while... you don't do things right once in a while... you do them right all the time. Winning is habit.
When a parasite moves to a new habitat, it can find new hosts through a process called the trans-species jump. Often, the new host has no resistance; it and the parasite haven't had time to adjust to each other through natural selection (it is frequently not in the best interest of a parasite to kill its host quickly).
The way to know about championship quality is to learn from champions, and that I did; studying them with professional purpose during my time in the ring and from habitual interest afterward.
I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.
All the time I had my success, I didn't know what I was doing. I struggled and struggled and hacked things out without any insight as to why.
Gene Hackman is one of the great American actors of all time.
After watching wrestling for 20 years, I thought I had enough confidence to do it. There were no wrestling schools at the time.
I used to do prank calls as these people and try to convince certain hoteliers that I was someone else. At the time, I used to do people like Tony Blair and William Hague. It was very good fun hearing people kind of thinking, 'Hmm, is that who I think it is?'
I used to experiment all the time with my hair color.
When I was 16, I started to spend a lot of time in Soho and downtown New York and noticed everyone's style and the eclectic things people would wear. And that's when I started to experiment with things like my lipstick and mixing different kinds of pieces and, of course, my hair color.
A lot of time, when you're poor and you ain't got but 15, 20 bucks in your pocket - if you can't change your shoes, you can change your look with a haircut.
