I had the chance to be governor for eight years and I took a year to transition out and a year to transition in, so that's a decade of my life where I pursued my own ambitions and I thought it was time to rearrange my life to focus on other things.
I was barely in grade school when I helped my mother rearrange the living room furniture for the first time.
I've never told anyone this before, but I'm an obsessive-compulsive. I go back to my hotel room every evening and put the coat hangers back in order and open my bag and rearrange it. It takes a lot of my time, but if I don't do it I can't sleep.
I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina, weird and pudgy, without too many other kids to play with. I spent a lot of time watching TV. It was my reassurance that the outside world was bigger and more colorful than the one I lived in.
Keira Knightley remains one of my mentors. I absolutely love her and will turn to her for industry advice or reassurance or validation at any time. She is very classy and elegant and lovely. I have a bit of a woman-crush on Keira.
I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.
I think I got stopped on the train once by a kid, and that was the first time I realised I had fans. He was shaking. I just reassured him that I'm an idiot and nothing special, so he didn't have to be nervous. It was very sweet.
If doctors just spent more time with their patients so they felt more reassured, that might help.
Every time you win, you're reborn; when you lose, you die a little.
I've just been on a German TV show called 'Come Back', a bit like 'Reborn In The USA', and the pressure of being scrutinised all the time by cameras has made me very self-conscious.
I think every time I go in a game, I have added something positive. I have gotten a rebound or made a defensive play. That is what I try to focus on.
If you help disabled children, it's very appealing. If you help kids with cancer, those are the things you get credit for and those things are beautiful. But when it comes to stopping violence or really putting the time into rebuilding schools, that's just a different kind of project. It takes more than just money to do that.
Rebuilding has always been one of my specialities from the time I started with young players at Cagliari.
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.
I cannot recall a time that I did not believe in Jesus Christ.
I recalled how a lot of my older siblings would go to a friend's house and borrow records to play and sometimes borrow a turntable because we didn't have a turntable in the house until I was 8, about the same time we had a TV.
We all maintained our connections and our friendships, which we've maintained over all these years. We still like each other, love each other, and we realize that this was a way to heal and a way to really bring Ricky back into the mix. I think a lot of the songs recalled that time in Athens with Ricky.
I have a hard time recalling the titles of books.
At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.
Few and far between are the books you'll cherish, returning to them time and again, to revisit old friends, relive old happiness, and recapture the magic of that first read.
