I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12 and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but also my work as well.
You know what I always say to people who say, "Oh, I wish I were 20 years younger"? I say, "Enjoy your age now, because in 20 years you'll be wishing you were this age." You might as well enjoy it at the present time. What I think keeps you young is always having something to look forward to and doing something new.
Well, you can, but tell you this, that when you've got an economy that is growing at 4.9% it is the fastest growth over the last 12 months we've seen in 20 years.
I've been in this league for 12 years. They can say I don't take the game serious, but somebody who don't take the game serious don't last this long.
Losing my mom at such a young age had a profound effect on my life.
My poor mum had a lot of problems with me around that time. I was young but I'd been working for years, so if she asked me to clean my room I'd say, 'You can't tell me what to do after I've worked a 12-hour day.' It gave me a power that no one that age should have.
I spent 12 years of my life, the last six years training six to eight hours a day, every day of my life. At the time, when I was 20 to 26, I could do things like that, and you're not going to notice it.
If I only had 12 years left to live, I'd want to live it as a member of Congress because that was the 12 longest years of my life.
Let me say that I think the economic history of the last 150 years clearly shows that if you want to industrialize a country in a short period, let us say 20 years, and you don't have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class, then central planning is important.
From the time I was twelve years old until I retired last year at the age of fifty-seven, the Army was my life. I loved commanding soldiers and being around people who had made a serious commitment to serve their country.
The first 20 years had such a profound effect on me, I spent the next 20 dealing with them.
I was very serious about ballet until the age of 12, at which point my body changed, and it wasn't quite right.
We're just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There's a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we'll look back and say, 'Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'
I have very good advice to give to kids this age, which is, you shouldn't listen to your mum or dad and you just have to work it out for yourself. And the reason I've taken the age range down this year, and I never would have done it 10 years ago, is what I've seen with the success of Willow Smith. You don't have to be so cutesy anymore.
My mum brought me up by herself, pretty much. She had me at the age of 20, and my grandmother was a single mother, too, for most of her life.
There's definitely some pieces in there that reflect on my personal life, but really, they aren't as personal as everybody thinks they are. I would like them to be more personal. The emotions, the songs themselves are personal. I can't do it - I've tried to write personally and it just doesn't seem to work. It would be too obvious. Some things that you could read in could fit into anyone's life that had any amount of pain at all. It's pretty cliche'.
I've learned, finally, how to balance work with having a personal life. I had to separate my personal and my professional life but now that I only have loving people in my life my personal and professional life blend together.