I started working at a really young age, so I didn't even go to traditional high school.
At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.
I feel like I was born to do this... I started working professionally as soon as I could, doing weddings and things like that in high school, while everyone else was having keg parties. I just felt destined to do it and really committed and driven; it was something that just felt right all my life.
Not being like everyone else is a great thing, but when you're in elementary school, you want people to like you, and kids that age can be so closed-minded. I mean, I went to a little Catholic school in the San Fernando Valley! My life was so different from the other kids'.
I started working professionally as soon as I could, doing weddings and things like that in high school, while everyone else was having keg parties. I just felt destined to do it and really committed and driven; it was something that just felt right all my life.
When I was at school, I was in choirs more than anything else, from a very young age, about 9 years old. And then I started taking drum lessons.
When I first started working, I was very aware of the fact that I'd been to university and studied Russian and French and not acting. So when I started working, I'd started working quite young, I felt like it was important to treat myself kind of like an apprentice and do as many different types of things as I could.
I went to film school when I was 17, and of course when you are very young you think that there is nothing else in the world except film. At some point I started getting hungry to see something else. For five years I didn't make any films, I was traveling around the world, writing for newspapers, working in theater, working in opera, I thought I would never return to film.
I started culinary school at a very young age, and really I wanted to be out working, cooking, more than I wanted to be in a classroom. You could say I wasn't a very good student - I wanted to be a student of life and experience.
When I started listening to Paramore, I was in high school, and they were, like, 15. Seeing somebody at such a young age have that ambition, I thought, holy crap, they were so young. They seemed like cool people, and I really liked the music.
I was expelled from school at 14, and whilst everyone else was studying for their GCSEs, I got a membership for that gym, and I just started lifting weights. So while everyone else was in school, I was in the gym sort of bulking up, and when I got to 17, I got a full time job.
At a stage when young people want more than anything to be like everyone else, they find themselves the least alike. Everyone their age is growing and changing, but each at his or her own pace.
I was always involved in the arts from a young age. I started studying classical piano at age four as a student of the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music.
Everyone has their own story and that’s something I hope for everyone to learn at a young enough age. Just because something is right for someone else doesn’t make it right for you. It’s cooler to be yourself.
If I regret leaving City, I'd regret leaving Madrid, I would regret Arsenal, and I would regret maybe even Metz, where I started off. So I have no regrets in life; life is too short to start regretting things.
I guess I have sort of an atypical relationship with my mom for someone my age, because I think I started so young with the music thing and I had my parents always on the road with me. So at a time when I think I should have been rebelling like in high school, they were actually my best friends.