A Quote by Isabel Allende
I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.
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If AOL had ever ordered me to remove a piece of content from the site for any reason, I would have immediately written about it and disclosed the situation to our readers. And if I had ever ordered a writer to remove content, I would have expected that writer to have done the same to me.
Before the military coup in Chile, we had the idea that military coups happen in Banana Republics, somewhere in Central America. It would never happen in Chile. Chile was such a solid democracy. And when it happened, it had brutal characteristics.
I would have to honestly say that my biggest regret is even starting this sport. I think I would've lived a different life if I would've stayed home in Memphis and worked at the family business. I'd be closer to my family and growing old with them instead of living out at California.
I think oldest children have a different mentality or know that there were different expectations of them, and I was not only the oldest child - I was the oldest grandchild of 18 grandchildren. I definitely grew up feeling like there were a lot of people who expected me to do something. But it was a very conservative family, very conservative neighborhood. I'm talking mid- to late '60s when I was growing up there, and so if I had stayed in the Boston area, I think my life would have been radically different.
On the farm, I had chores. I had a calf. We had a herd of cattle in the pasture. We'd go and get me a calf at a cow auction with Amish people, which I would raise. I gave it a bottle every day, in this cute little coop, like a giant dog coop almost. I've always been a big animal person.
I did get good enough to get on HBO's Young Comedians Special, but I certainly wasn't the person who got launched off of HBO's Young Comedians Special. That would be Ray Romano that year. I had some semi-intelligent jokes, but when people would see me, they would think, "Oh, that's a good writer." No one would ever have said, "Oh, that's a good performer."
If we expected self-reliance of family groups, if we expected hardiness and resilience and initiative on the part of individuals, and if we rewarded initiative instead of dependence on government, we would not only ameliorate many of the family-related social problems we see at present, but we would also reduce our vulnerability to terrorism. People who are hardy, resilient, and self reliant are a lot harder to terrorize.
I lived on a farm with cows, and I lived in the city with rats. My family stayed in Colorado for a while, then went from Los Angeles to Arizona. People would ask me where I'm from, and I would have to say, 'I don't have a clear answer for you.'
I was very rebellious, but my family was strict Christians - they would ask us, "What's the shortest verse in the Bible?" and I was the one who always said "John 11:35" straightaway. It stayed with me, the Bible has stayed with me.
I remember somebody asking me in an interview years ago if I would be interested in playing Jason Bourne. I laughed: I didn't think anybody would want to see me run around with a machine gun. It always stayed in the back of my head that I had reacted like that. It bothered me.
I think a lot of people assume you need to be born into a special creative family to have a career as a writer. So I never thought it would happen for me.
At home and in church - which I didn't go to a lot, I was very rebellious, but my family was strict Christians - they would ask us, 'What's the shortest verse in the Bible?' and I was the one who always said 'John 11:35' straightaway. It stayed with me: the Bible has stayed with me.
I started out as an actor, but I forced myself to be a writer, even though I wasn't very good at it and had never written. I don't think I ever passed an English course in my life. My first eight to 10 scripts were pretty horrendous, but I stayed at it, stayed at it, and stayed at it, until I eventually found a voice and a subject like Rocky that people were interested in.
If I had stayed in Hollywood, I would have killed myself. Or someone would have done it for me.
What I could really use is an older man. A mentor. One who could tell me how things fit together. He would have asked me to do chores that I felt were meaningless. I would have been impatient and protested, but done them nonetheless. And eventually, after several months of hard labour, I would have realised that there was a deeper meaning behind it all, and that the master had a cunning plan all the time.
The only thing I consider appalling would be to suddenly become a vegetable and a burden on other people. A soul slowly dying out, trapped in a body in which the insides gradually sabotage me - that, I think, would be terrifying.
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