I enjoyed physical education and lunch time. The social aspect of school was great, but as soon as I left school, I wanted to get out there and race. I couldn't sit still for long.
You know, there was a time, just before I started to study physical science, when astronomers thought that systems such as we have here in the solar system required a rare triple collision of stars.
My father left his piano at the house when he left, and I wasn't allowed to play it when he was there because I wasn't as good as him. So when he left, I was determined to get as good as him, and I taught myself how to play music, and I just stuck with it, and I did it all the time.
I took piano lessons when I was like 5 or 6 but that was a long time ago. I stopped when I was 13.
Kylie and I were both taking piano lessons at the time and didn't think of acting. A friend rang mum up and said, 'How about bringing Kylie and Danielle in because they might be right for the part?'
I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So everything I do at this point is more philosophical.
I started playing the piano when I was 6 years old 'cause my folks tried to get me away from the gramophone. And I just - I lived for music since I could think. And they got me piano lessons. So by the time I was 13, I was quite an accomplished piano player and musician.
We used to move pianos in New York City, and one time, it was, like, eight guys on a piano that was made of glass. We were moving it for Alicia Keys.
I really wanted to find a piano for the farm house. There were so many free pianos on Craigslist, I thought, 'Let's get as many free pianos as we can and stick them all in the barn.' I got eight in a short period of time, only six of which were tunable, but it's still quite funny.
I had the blessing of opportunity. You need the folks in the boardroom who have consciences and the people in the streets who can picket at the right time.
Every time you drop the price by a factor of two, you roughly get a 10 times pickup of the number of people who will seriously consider buying it.
To fans in a festival setting it's like a picnic. You want to have a good time with your friends in that crowd. And in the background you hear the band play, 'Oh, that's my favorite song!' everyone is there to enjoy the afternoon and that's about it.
I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, 'It's just not in me to write a novel. It's not something I'm able to do.' It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.
I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.
Force me to choose my best book, and I always come back to 'Gorilla.' It was the first time I felt I understood what picture books could do.
Many adults that I have met in my time believed that picture books are 'babyish'. I hope I have changed minds on this, as I set out to do.
One of my main decisions when accepting the job of Children's Laureate was that I must continue working on picture books. If I don't write and illustrate for some time, then I begin to question who I am.
I have a very hard time picturing myself in a room with some type of goo oozing out of an air vent and killing me; that doesn't really scare me because I don't think that's going to happen to me.
Next time we need to be on drugs and have lots of suffering and alcohol abuse going on while recording, I'm kinda picturing a Jerry Lee Lewis session from the mid Seventies.
I don't understand why James Bond has to be a man all the time. When Pierce Brosnan retires, why not one of us?
