I mean, I grew up with nothing. Crazy crime rate. Exposed to a lot of stuff that a young kid shouldn't be. Obviously, I would have loved to feel a little bit safer at times in my life.
I was a little bit of a tech lord. Not a lord. More of a duke or a nobleman. I was into that stuff as a kid. Nothing too crazy.
We all feel that if we have a crazy idea that might get laughed at, there's nothing wrong with seeing if there's a crazy writer out there who agrees with us and can take it to a crazy network and somehow bring something that's a little bit daft and edgy to life.
I grew up in a very working-class area with a high crime rate and when I first started to break away from my social conditioning, I fell into a life of crime.
I grew up listening to a lot of player-piano music in my house and a lot of old Tin Pan Alley songs and American standards. My dad listened to a lot of traditional Irish music and I grew up doing musical theater. So most of the music I was exposed to as a kid was pre-rock n' roll.
Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars, rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades. You can well imagine liberals' surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction and As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages.
I loved the Rolling Stones. I heard a little bit of country music creeping around the edges of some of their songs. Being a Mississippi kid, I could feel they had done their homework, even when I was a little boy. I could feel the Delta blues influence in a lot of their work.
As a kid, I mostly played as a No 10. When I was really young, I played as a striker. But I grew a lot when I was older, and when I was 15, 16, I had a big growth, and so I changed a little bit and became slower.
When you grow up Jewish, you are exposed at a very young age to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism and its extreme manifestation in the Holocaust. I spent a lot of time as a little kid wondering how something like that could happen.
People say the comedy is so shocking, but if you read newspapers or look around generally - I mean, obviously I'm not writing about all the lovely things that there are, which I do see as well - but there is a lot of outrageousness around, slightly covered up. And obviously, it's fun to take that a little bit further.
I grew up listening to a lot of classic jazz, and stuff like The Beatles, and old Motown stuff, and a lot of classical music. I just loved all of that.
As a guitarist and a lot of the times as a singer, I don't feel that comfortable and you really feel that when there's not an electric guitar or a nice beat to back it up. But, I enjoy challenges as a rule. I have always felt that what doesn't kill you, will make you stronger. I have learned to love with the rawness a little bit more and I know what I need to work on a little bit more as the tour goes on.
We got broken into our house three times in five years in L.A., so I wanted to find somewhere where I feel safer, and where my whole family would feel safer.
I love watching the Bond movies obviously and I grew up reading the books as a kid. I've always loved them because of that.
I'm from Ghana and I grew up in Hackney around a lot of aunties which exposed me to beauty and skin stuff.
My first interest was always music, and somehow that channelled itself into films and acting. I don't know what the natural transition of it was. I mean I acted a little bit when I was young and like any kid would in a community theatre.
I just love kids. As a kid, I grew up in a poor country with a poor family that had nothing. I loved anyone who could come into my life, in from the outside, and give me advice that could help me succeed. I believe that there are a lot of people who came into my life that made me Dikembe Mutombo.