I have had many challenges in my life, including some very big ones when I was young and I've learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way. I have seen life from just about every angle you can see it from.
Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.
From a young age, I had done a lot of theater and musical theater. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but every time I was away from acting, I just felt very incomplete and a little stir crazy.
I really believe I'm no different from anyone else. I just had a few challenges I had to learn from at a very early age.
I've had several moments in my career where it seemed like I might not age out of the bracket the world wants to put you in. It's hard to keep growing up inside the performing arts. It's very difficult, and presents a lot of unique challenges.
Staying chaste until marriage, a commandment of my faith, was one of the most difficult challenges of my young life. I had a powerful sense that if I did not get a grip on my identity, my ethics, and my religion, I would go off the rails.
The idea of being a 'child star' always sounded awful to people my age, and so I was just very aware that these things are kind of fleeting and that a lot of it didn't have to do with me: it had to do with my age; it had to do with whatever came to mind when people thought of a young internet sensation.
I think we have to go through everything we go through in our life, and I believe my purpose in life was to teach self-reliance. So I had the experience of relying on myself very early in life in order to have that knowing, because otherwise I would've just read about it. I think of it now as a great advantage that I had. It certainly taught me to rely upon myself at a very young age. And that's what I've been teaching since I was a little boy.
The most difficult thing about my job is that I do a lot of 19-hour days. It's really difficult to have a life, never mind a relationship. I don't have any regrets, really. I'm quite content. I'm very stubborn and persistent. I just keep working.
I always managed to get in trouble, like every kid. But I had to learn a lot of hard lessons on my own, without parents who would nurture me and guard me through that part of life, at a very young age.
My first year, I was really a kind of a wild guy. But I had a very difficult car to drive and I was very young. I think I was maybe too young to have started straight away.
From a fairly young age, Donald had a really hard time reading social cues. You know, the rules in the house, my grandparents' house were very different from the rules in school. So, he had a difficult time adjusting to that.
We were just trying to make the films that we could get made, and to push the envelope. We didn't realize how far we had pushed the envelope. That all came later. That all came from books and articles about the golden age of the '70s. Believe me, to a lot of us, it was no golden age. The studio heads were very powerful then. They would fire guys right and left. They would look at your dailies and tell you what was wrong with them... a lot of stuff that doesn't go on today. Young filmmakers who are successful today, they don't often have that to put up with.
Yes, I was given a privileged position at a young age. But if I had not been willing to work hard and prepare myself for all the challenges I would face, I would not have held on to my position all these years, regardless of my family ties.
When I was very young, there was a lot of music at home, mostly jazz. I was walking around singing and pretending I was in bands from a very young age. But the first song that was really personal to me was 'Blue Suede Shoes'.
I was really lucky because from a very young age, I wanted to be a doctor. So I kinda knew I had that goal for my whole life.