I had started as an average athlete - a normal boy. It took me three years to win a race. I was glad that I endured those three years - that I did not give up.
I consider myself normal. I've spent 20 years in the pool. I consider that something that's normal.
My quality of life is more amazing than I ever could've imagined in those 20 years of struggling with illness. In those 20 years, I did not know the meaning of the word hope. It was just a bleak, difficult existence. With all the gifts, with all the successes that I had, it was still an incredibly bleak way of living and I want to be a messenger of hope.
I look back on the time I've wasted, and I'm just glad I wasted it while I still had the chance.
It's not even so much about publicity, it's more just letting people know that things are available, because books aren't a flash in the pan thing. It's more like: "It took 20 years for this book to be done and now it'll be on a shelf for 20 years until the right person finds it."
My years as a therapist working with abuse and neglect families taught me at least one important lesson for my own life. Never judge until you can see through the eyes of that person you are judging, and then... never judge.
Tell the truth. All the time. About everything. What's the alternative to radical honesty? Waste. Wasted time, wasted money, wasted possibilities-a wasted life.
=> When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile. => Never tell your problems to anyone...20% don't care and the other 80% are glad you have them. => It's true that we don't know what we've got until we lose it, but it's also true that we don't know what we've been missing until it arrives.
The doctor asked what my diet was like and I had to sit down and realize it's not normal, and hadn't been normal for about 20 years.
I had hit a critical period in my life, where I changed very much as a person. I consider the person I used to be, dead, and I'm glad that he is. Insecure, frightened, confused, much like a lot of people I know today.
Back 20 years ago, I was recording with Bruce Springsteen, and his producer called me and said I had to be in the studio the next day to finish the sessions, and I couldn't. I had to be in court, in California. All this took like 10 years out of my life.
By college, I had a really grand, preposterous vision of myself as becoming a writer, but I don't think I had the discipline or the patience - or the ability or the humility. It took 20 years to acquire those things.
It's a time in my life that I'm glad it's behind me. I've had time to reflect on the whole thing. I want to talk about it one time and kind of lay it to rest. I'm ready to put it behind me. I've learned my lesson. I don't recommend the experience I had to anyone, really. It's not something that was fun. It's not a destination you would choose.
Never take no for an answer. It took me 20 years between the time I wrote my first screenplay and the time I actually got money to direct a movie.
I come from a very normal day job, a very normal upbringing, so I had six or seven years working in an office nine to five in human resources. I had the normal life and kind of thought maybe this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life but still had that passion and that yearning for music.
My real difficulty was to become a normal person again, after having been a movie actress for so long. For me, at the time I was living in New York and Hollywood, a normal person was someone who made movies.