If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
I grew up in - I personally grew up in a gun culture. I grew up in upstate New York where most families had guns for hunting, target practice, whatever. The vast majority of people I knew never used their guns for any crime.
I grew up at Kabir Choura in Varanasi in the 1970s. It was an era when communal riots used to happen every now and then at different places.
I never wanted to get to a point in my life where I knew what was going to happen next. I felt like most people just couldn't wait until they found themselves settled down into a routine and they didn't have to think about the next day, or the next year, or the next decade because it was all planned out for them. I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life.
A lot of people say, 'What set the Attitude Era up?' or, 'What started the Attitude Era?' To me - and I was allegedly the leader of it - sports entertainment, pro wrestling, whatever you want to call it has always had an attitude. So, why that particular generation got labeled, I don't know.
I knew when I was a kid that I had a Broadway voice. I wanted to be a rocker, because I grew up in that era of transistor radios at the beach.
I used to have the Virgin music [stores], and I would go there and just go up the escalator and say to myself, 'I'm soaking in these last moments of anonymity.' I knew I was going to make it this far; I knew that this was going to happen
I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be..... But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next.
But I grew up in a place where no one knew anyone in the entertainment business, I never knew it was an actual career. The closest I ever got to movies was going to watch them, and I thought that's the way it would be, so I never considered working in this business.
I grew up under Thatcher; the era of apartheid; the era of the poll tax; the era of riots. I remember Neil Kinnock was a hero.
A lot of black people worked with the police as snitches. We used to call them bimpees where I grew up. And, you know, they were afforded special privileges. They may have been paid by the police. But you never knew who was informing on you. We lived either next door to or - two doors away from us was a known informant in Soweto.
I make bangers all the time, and I knew it was going to come. My mom probably used to think it wasn't going to happen. My daughter's mom thought it wasn't going to happen, and a couple of girlfriends. You just gotta keep on doing it. I'm living proof.
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.
I would say I'm black because my parents said I'm black. I'm black because my mother's black. I'm black because I grew up in a family of all black people. I knew I was black because I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. And my parents, as part of their protective mechanisms that they were going to give to us, made it very clear what we were.
When I moved to Los Angeles, aged 54, I printed out Winston Churchill's phrase, 'Never, never, never give up', and stuck it on my fridge. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I knew I had to keep on going.