I'm from a singing family, but they're not professional singers, only gospel - my grandfather was a minister. I started to sing the music that was out then because my mother used to play it all the time. It was the end of the '50s, the beginning of the '60s. There was Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers, Etta James... We used to sit outside on the stoop and sing. We even used to put our radios and record players outside.
I used to say teenagers were the aliens among us and I think all teenagers feel that way in many respects.
I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.
I just want it to go back to the way it was." "It'll never go back to the way it was, Frankie. But you have to make sure it goes forward.
I'm a post-Abner Jay kind of guy mixed with Roger Corman and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.
Back then, as a kid, you made a choice of who you liked, and it was either us or 'Take That.' And if you liked 'East 17', it showed you knew what was going on, you were clued up, had better taste in music.
Back before I entered primary school, I liked to draw, even though I was a brat. I especially liked animals and vehicles, and I drew that sort of thing constantly.
But I liked you from the moment I first heard your voice,” he said, “when I had no idea what you looked like. I thought it delicious, the way you bargained for me, as though I were an old rug. Then I loved the way you looked at me. Then I loved the way you ordered me about. I loved your patient and impatient ways of explaining things to me. I love the sound of your voice and the way you move. I love your courage and your kindness and your generosity and your obstinacy and your passion.” He paused. “You’re the genius. What do you think that means?
Back then though, you had a few months of training, and then you were just thrown into it.
It always sounds kind of trivial, but when I was a kid I was always so impressed by how serious the comic books were. I always liked how they were half way between literature and the cinema. I liked the visuals and I liked the simplicity of a certain type of moral dilemma.
He liked the way her hand felt in his, liked the simple intimacy of the gesture and the way it said - without the need for words - that they were together.
Frankie appreciated both the accolades and the rejections equally, because both meant she'd had an impact. She wasn't a person who needed to be liked so much as she was a person who liked to be notorious.
I had the benefit of parents who believed deeply in my ability. And they were teenagers when they had me - they were teenagers when they got married - but they instilled in me that you can do anything and that brains were most important, that passion was important, and drive.
Grunge gave me a sense of identity, and I remember really associating with 'Silverchair,' who were these chilled-out Australian teenagers. The fact that they were teenagers was a big deal for me. It was like, 'Oh, man, you don't have to be a 30-year-old to do this.'
The shifts happen on a regular basis, but it's like a cycle. So things come in and out of vogue and then five years later they're back in vogue. Or there seems to be a theory that this is the way the industry will go and everybody goes over that way and then something happens to the country and you're back again at the place you were.
Though I would have liked my chances in a rematch in 1998 if I were better prepared, it was clear then that computer superiority over humans in chess had always been just a matter of time.