I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn't breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children's mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.
There was no active, conscious decision-making point, just a gradual realization over time that I'm very happy minus children and marriage.
The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
When I first started playing the banjo and miraculously fell into a record deal in Nashville, TN, there was a period when I didn't go to China. It hurt. Like a pain in my gut... that pain you feel when you know it's time to connect with your parents or your God or your child or your past or your future... and you don't do it.
I'm pretty single-minded, unlike a lot of directors who miraculously seem to be holding six projects in their hand at a given time and juggling them accordingly.
Chemistry seems to be pretty much nailed down, and biology gains ground all the time. But physics seems to be mired in idle rumination. They think a Big Bang started the universe, but they don't really know.
I was performing in front of mirrors forever. Just jumping around my room at, like, three in the morning when everybody else was sleeping. So when it came time, I was so ready.
I never felt so close to a guitar as that silver one with mirrors that I used on stage all the time.
Having the right people around you all the time is important. I do take the acting seriously. But this is all fun. I look at it like smoke and mirrors. I still think it's a dream, but I ain't pinching myself yet.
It is not time for mirth and laughter, the cold, gray dawn of the morning after.
The misconception is that standup comics are always on. I don't know any really funny comics that are annoying and constantly trying to be funny all the time.
Get proper training right from the beginning. It prevents injuries and avoids wasting your time with misdirected effort, which is what most people generally don't understand. Give it your all from day one.
I think probably the first time I wanted to be an artist was when I was about six or seven years old. I used to get British comics and I clearly remember seeing my first American comic: an issue of 'Action Comics', with Superman on the cover with a treasure horde in a cave, and Lois saying something like 'I don't believe Superman is a miser!'
If you have a sense of irony or humour, you're usually cut down, as you're usually distorted or misinterpreted. So it does lead to us being slightly more dour and staid and predictable than would otherwise be the case, which I personally find quite frustrating - because if you don't laugh occasionally in my job, you cry most of the time.
I have fun with it and I am honest and open about the way I lead my life and don't mislead anyone. I've had the time of my life and thank God for that, it would be such a waste otherwise.
It's time to save the U.N. from its own scandals and mismanagement. It's time for U.N. Reform with teeth.
For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
One of the big first computers was called SAGE, which was a missile defense, the first missile-defense computer, which was, like, one of the first computers in the history of the world which got sold to the Department of Defense for, I don't know, tens and tens of millions of dollars at the time.
I actually don't remember Apollo 11 exactly because, at the time, I was five years old. The landing happened at night, and the walk on the moon happened at night eastern time, and I asked my parents; my mom said I was probably asleep, and so I just don't have any recollection. I do have recollection of the later missions to the moon.
When I made 'Who Needs Pictures,' my first album, I had been west of the Mississippi River one time in my life, and that was in fourth grade. We traveled to California for vacation and stayed with some friends of my parents. It was culture shock, and it was different.
