In a funny way, the illness spurred me on. I thought to myself, 'I've got to get through this operation to make a blues album.'
There is no kind way to rip the skin off animals' backs. Anyone who wears any fur shares the blame for the torture and gruesome deaths of millions of animals each year.
I approach 'Fast & Furious 6' the same way I would approach a Sidney Lumet film. Getting into character's getting into character.
We see ourselves in the House as sort of the engine room of the ship of the Republican Party. We're down in the bottom... in the bowels shoveling coal into the furnace. And, by the way, there's nothing wrong with coal.
I knew that my dollhouse was a toy, but in a way, it seemed more like a portal to adulthood. I didn't play with it the way I might with my Barbie dream house. Instead, I furnished it. I kept it pristine. I decorated the house for each season. I had jack-o'-lanterns in the fall and a Christmas tree with working lights in the winter.
The whole reason people fill their homes with furry carnivores and not with, say, iguanas and turtles, is because mammals offer something no reptile ever will. They give affection, they want affection, and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs.
In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors.
I wrote the text of the resignation. I cannot say with precision when, but at the most two weeks before. I wrote it in Latin because something so important you do in Latin. Furthermore, Latin is a language in which I know well how to write in a more appropriate way.
I'm probably the furthest from being romantic that you've ever seen; I'm not even close to being romantic in any way until I have to be.
I will indulge my sorrows, and give way to all the pangs and fury of despair.
I never officially came out in any kind of really public way. I just always lived very simply and openly, but the press has never made a big fuss about me or said anything to me.
I eat to live and not the other way around. As a vegetarian, I'm not at all fussy about food and can make do with anything.
I even get tired performing standup, which is normally a low-impact exercise in futility but looks hard the way I do it. That's why I take a lot of breaks, often stopping in the middle of a joke to catch my breath, or blame the crowd for not laughing before the punchline.
There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.
The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live.
The book that is the closest genetically to 'Goon Squad' is 'Look at Me.' It has the futuristic element - although, freakishly, almost every aspect I invented has come to pass in some way, including the terrorist who fantasies about blowing up the World Trade Centre. That was extremely uncomfortable. The book came out on the week of 9/11.
My mentor in the transition from the old Gabriel Heatter and John Cameron Swayze way of doing things was David Brinkley. He brought an entirely different style to what we were doing.
Gaddafi's ability to have survived so long rests on his convenient position in not being committed to a single ideology and his use of violence in such a theatrical way.
I am guilty of buying way too many gadgets - way too many! And though I try to keep things nice and orderly, sometimes I get distracted and stick saucepans where the stockpots should go.
My father could swear in Gaelic and English, by the way, ladies and gentlemen.
