There were so many stories and so many instances where I had guys telling me that this game was for two-handed players and not for one-handed players, and I'll go out here and get myself hurt.
Nothing has been handed to me my entire life. You have to go there and take it. My mom taught me that.
Life is all in the setup. A lot of people think I got the world handed to me, and I let them think exactly that whilst they handed me the world.
When I went to school, most parents wanted their children to get good A-levels, to go to university, and get a degree so your children had a better life than you. The way out of poverty was through a degree. But the whole world has moved on from that.
I'm left-handed, and it's not very easy to find reasonably priced, high-quality left-handed guitars. But out of all the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favorite. I've only owned two of them.
I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.
Nothing's really been handed to me, and I've stayed in the game long enough to get an opportunity that I've been hopefully knocking it out of the park every chance I get.
There came a time in my life where I just wanted to go out there and get myself a job somewhere. Boxing was all I had in my life for so long and there just came a point where the whole thing just became a bit too much for me.
So often, we're expected to maintain some sort of standard - that won't get you where you need to go. One of the most daring things I've done is drop out of graduate school. I had no job, but something inside me was saying, 'Go! Be in the world!' I had to listen to myself, and it worked out. I still think, 'Who was that girl?'
I'm in a position where whatever I do, I can get my head handed to me. I'm in a position to fail because there is a whole group of people out there who want me to fail. It's a weird vibe.
You know, the same percentage of people are gay and lesbian as are left-handed. Let's try to figure that out. How can it be that a left-handed person can get married to another left-handed person. Left-handed people can do anything they want. . . . I say, give homosexuals the same rights we give left-handed people.
Give me the whole world to run and then I'll be happy. If tomorrow I was told I had to sort out the whole world's problems I'd sleep like a baby.
The whole world is nothing but a noise, as hot as the inside of a tiger's mouth. They call it civilization - that is a lie! But some day you may have to go out, someone will try to take you out, and you will not understand them or what they are saying, unless you understand nothing, absolutely nothing, then you will manage.
...fiction is made out of the writer's experience, his whole life from infancy on, everything he's thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn't something you go and get - it's a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that "experience"; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing.
Don't hanker for the other world. Live this world, and live it with intensity, with passion. Live it with totality, with your whole being. And out of that whole trust, out of that life of passion, love, and joy, you will become able to go beyond.
I've had a normal life, but I have struggled to get here. It hasn't been handed to me and it hasn't been easy.