There have been periods of my career that I haven't worked for a really long time, like seven or eight months.
Every day, I just thank the universe that I am as lucky as I am. Because, I went through periods of time when I didn't have a single bit of work. Months and months where I was auditioning all the time. I mean, all the time, and nothing was happening.
There are times as an actor when you don't work for two months, sometimes three or sometimes six, and the only thing that's going to keep you sane is if you give back and live your life. I've definitely gone through that. It's like, 'Okay, I'm out of work for two months.' That's two months I can paint.
I think everybody, especially every woman that you speak to, has gone through periods of their life where they feel uncertain or insecure. But I've been fortunate in my own life never to have gone through extended periods of crippling insecurity.
I spend most of my time in a room alone where eight hours go by, and I have no sense of time. I work seven days a week, and I live in this sort of vague subconscious fog a lot.
I've gone through long periods of time when there's no work for me. You wait for the next job to come along, and when it does, there's never a consideration about whether you do or don't do something.
Shooting a season can be a grind. It can be seven to eight months of work. Once you stop, it slows down any momentum you had.
When I did "Seven Easy Pieces," I actually re-performed the performances of other artists. It was such difficult work because I had to really go through the documentation, look through the sources, to ask the witnesses who saw it.
Playing a TV character for seven years is almost like when you do a play. You live, breathe, and everything else with that character 24-7 for six months or four months or whatever, and that gets very deep in your blood. When you do a TV character for seven years, that's a long time. It becomes a seminal era in your life.
Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write - eight months for 'Seesaw Girl,' eight months for 'Shard,' three years for 'When My Name Was Keoko!' The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether each book can take up to three or four years to publish.
Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write - eight months for Seesaw Girl, eight months for Shard, three years for When My Name Was Keoko! The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether each book can take up to three or four years to publish.
And yeah, my handicap was down to a 10 when we were at the thick of it. I trained for six or seven months, golfing every day for six hours, seven days a week, with eight trainers. It was intense.
You're going to feel good. But no matter how much you rehab you do, you can't speed up the healing process. I would rather see a guy come back in 14 months and pitch seven, eight or nine more years then come back in 10 months and get hurt again. You cannot mess with mother nature and father time. Nature will heal it if you give it time.
In the late '60s, I was seven, eight, nine years old, and what was going on in the news at that time that really excited a seven, eight, nine year old boy was the Space Race.
I don't understand people who want to leave a good job. To me, without being terribly judgmental, those are people who haven't gone through their stint of being out of work for long periods of time.
I went to work at seven in the morning. Around noon time we got the watery soup. And we worked until seven or eight or nine at night, sometimes later. And then I walked back home - there was no public transportation - into that shared room. And if there was food we would prepare an evening meal depending on what was available. And then probably go to bed because it was cold most the time. And then start the day all over again, six or seven days a week.