A Quote by Bob Colacello
I think because both of my parents were essentially salespeople, and Italian-Americans, I always seemed to get along with people; I had a knack of finding something to talk about.
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My parents were both from extremely different backgrounds. My father's Italian, my mother was of Swedish descent. They're both first-generation Americans.
I think the desire to be a journalist started post-911. I'm Syrian American. I speak fluent Arabic. I'd come back to the States for college. I went to Skidmore in upstate New York. I was coming from Turkey, and I'd noticed that I could talk about concepts and ideas and people who seemed foreign to Americans, and they were interested in what I had to say. I think some of it is maybe because I'm very unassuming and I look American, but I'm very much from there as well so I can speak with authority about all of these issues.
I've always had to force myself to make friends and speak to people. My parents were quiet, and it took me a while to get used to the fact that people talk about their feelings, their problems.
My wife and I both grew up with parents who were very young. Her mom was, I think, 17 or 18 when she was born; my mom was 15 when I was born. So, as we got older, we started thinking a lot about that - about the time that those people missed because we came along when we did and because they devoted so much of their lives to taking care of us.
We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.
Even though novels were the love of my life, I started off writing poetry. I think because I had a knack for image and lyricism, even though I didn't really have anything to write about, or I didn't know what to write about. I could just couple words together that pleased me and so poetry seemed sort of natural.
It seemed that the problem of Americans overdosing and dying from drug addiction was being described as bad people, particularly kids, who were abusing good drugs. But Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO Documentary Films, and I were particularly interested in finding out the stories of people and families who had been ravaged by this disease of addiction and understanding what really was happening. What we found was that, and let's not make any mistake about it, this is an epidemic of addiction.
I've always had that knack for staying pretty even keel and the more the situation gets tense the more I see things clearly and I think that's just a knack that I've always had.
My parents were screenwriters, and they had four daughters and we all write. So that's amazing. Talk about powerful parents. My mother always said to us, "Everything is copy."
I look back to the 1980s and 1990s, when Italian teams dominated Europe. They had maybe three players from abroad, but they were the best players in the world. That was perfect, because there was always the possibility for young Italian players to get in the team.
Democratic, Republican members of Congress get along fine. But what you have is this institutional Hatfield and McCoy sentiment coming from our constituents, where the base of both sides doesn't want people to get along. But the majority of Americans, I feel, the majority, they are in the middle. They actually do want both sides to get together.
It's a fine line of doing what's good for your life and what your parents want you to do, but also following your dreams. With my parents, when I was younger, I always had to do two things. If I was acting, I always had to do a sport or something on the arts side of things, along with that. That way, if one fell apart, I always had something else to fall back on.
Before the war, my parents were very proud people. They'd always talk about Japan and also about the samurai and things like that. Right after Pearl Harbor, they were just real quiet. They kept to themselves; they were afraid to talk about what could happen. I assume they knew that nothing good would come out of it.
I always tell people go see something you don't know about. Something you didn't read a ton about on the internet. Something that you don't know what's going to happen because I think that kind of pleasure of finding something new and discovering it, creates a hunger in you.
All I knew about the word cyberspace when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.
If you did something, and it wasn't right, you definitely found out about it. And they were pretty smart people, both my parents, so you didn't get too much by them.
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