A Quote by Mary GrandPre

I was quite nauseous every day at school - I had some real stomach problems. The thing that saved me was sitting in church and trying to get into these statues and windows and colors. Truly, it transported me. And I can see it now in my own work - my pictures have kind of that look.
I've had this terrible stomach problem for years, and that has made touring difficult. People would see me sitting in the corner by myself looking sick and gloomy. The reason is that I was trying to fight against the stomach pain, trying to hold my food down. People looked me and assumed I was some kind of addict.
Sports became a way for me to find my personality and identity in life. I had a lot of problems as a young kid like we all do with my own confidence, trying to grow up, and become a man and whatnot. Sports helped me get there. It helped me get my role in Rocky IV. It has helped me ever since in my movies and dealing with a lot of hard times between pictures and my life. I would say it's the one thing that's kept me going over the years.
I think, then, there's the sort of, like, political dimension to lyrics. One of the problems that I've had with my output as a lyric writer is that I look back at it and there's some turn-of-phrases and some images and some kind of montage-y kinds of things I'm really proud of. But it kind of bums me out that people have told me again and again that they don't really understand what I'm trying to say.
I like what I see when I look in the mirror. If I get sentimental, I look and say, "Uh. It's a bad day. They beat up on me," this, that, and the other thing. But ya know? We've spent one billion trying to convince people to not smoke. It's been phenomenally successful. We've probably saved millions of lives. There aren't many people that have done that. So, you know, when I get to heaven, I'm not sure I'm gonna stand for an interview. I'm going right in.
Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed.
When I was growing up, I grew up in church--my father was a pastor--so when I was growing up in Trinidad, I'd close all the windows in the church and go in the church every day after school and get a little microphone and pretend all these people were in the pews, and I would sing to them.
I look at old pictures of me... and I don't feel like I'm that guy anymore, but then I look at pictures of me now, and I'm not quite sure I'm this guy.
I had a lot of challenges starting school, and my dad says I would come home every day crying and feeling bad about the problems I was having with some of the kids. And he would tell me to work hard on learning the language.
And lastly, when other things in life get tough, when you're going through family troubles, when you're heartbroken, when you're frustrated with money problems, focus on your work. It has saved me through every single difficult thing I have ever had to do, like a scaffolding that goes far beyond any traditional notions of a career.
I want to tell you about a woman I have been married to for ten years, my wife, Ann, who speaking truthfully, saved me from myself. Who saved me from destroying myself because of my background. Who saved me from wasting my life, drinking my life away, never fulfilling my dreams because of what I had come from, and truly believing and loving - truly the first person to ever truthfully, unconditionally love me.
My work is very dear to me, and certainly I have had all the emotional highs and lows that go with trying to get it to an audience. But I do have some kind of detachment that seems somewhat unusual in my trade. I'm a writer who writes every day. I don't have a period of months where I can't get anything done and I wander around tearing my hair out. When I come back from a book tour, for instance, I might have one day where I sleep late and then check my e-mail, and then go for a walk, and then the next day I'm really itching to get back at writing a story.
My own son has a congenital heart condition, where his life was saved by a cardiac surgeon stepping in at 11 days of life to save his life. But he is now 21 years old because of constant monitoring and working with him with a primary care physician. that's the only reason now that he's getting to live a long and healthy life. That's what we're not rewarding. They don't have the kind of resources and commitment that we are giving to people like me. I have millions of dollars of equipment available to me when I go to work every day in an operating room.
I thought about the problems I had growing up: how I prioritised football over school, but people were telling me I wouldn't make it, that it wasn't possible. The thing is, I did make it, thanks to my own will and determination and the help of some people I had around me in my hometown.
I think people look at dance music and see it as kind of a bad thing, and bad people hang out in nightclubs, but it never felt that way for me. Growing up in Chicago, music was the thing that saved me, that kept me on the straight and narrow.
If you were to look back at me as a school kid you'd see a very quiet little church mouse kind of character.
I have a very beautiful life with great friends and I look forward to waking up every day. Every day is a vacation but every day is a workday. I don't want to take vacations because music is my life and if I escape from music, that's the same thing as death. So a vacation is death to me. Sitting on the beach for a week is my idea of hell. That would kill me.
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