The media had me convicted of doing something wrong before I had even done anything at all, before I had talked to anyone, before I get out of bed. I'm always the bad person.
When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.
He had a way with him. Before you had a chance to say no, he was there and done. That only happened to me once before, with a duke, who literally swept me off my feet, and before I knew what was happening, we'd done it. Another terrible mistake.
I refused to accept anything, doubted everything. So, doubting everything, I had to find something that had not existed before, something I had not thought of before. Any idea that came to me, the thing would be to turn it around and try to see it with another set of senses.
I find it is a bad habit to look at social media before bed, so I try to read something on paper - not on my phone - before I go to bed.
Anyway, the title The War of the Insect Gods came before we had that ending, before we knew they had become gods. That we knew the evolutionary cycle they went through. Before we even knew anything about that. We had an ending.
My part of Brooklyn has always been a very warm neighbourhood, even before I had anything going on in the music industry. When I step out of my house to go for coffee on Saturday mornings, I might say hi to 20 people before I get to the cafe. I think they feel they own me, in a way.
Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.
I had never even thought about doing something that I'd never done before or proving anything.
The band that changed my life was The Who. It's hard to pick just one album, but if I had to pick the one that really showed me how things could be done, it's 'The Who Sell Out.' They really went to town on that, doing something that no one had ever done before.
I guess that one of the most important things I've learned is that nothing is ever completely bad. Even cancer. It has made me a better person. It has given me courage and a sense of purpose I never had before. But you don't have to do like I did...wait until you lose a leg or get some awful disease, before you take the time to find out what kind of stuff you're really made of. You can start now. Anybody can.
In order for me to get right, I had to go back to Memphis, I had to close myself in, get in the studio, lock in, and just think about everything before all the ice, before the money, before everything, and just vent.
I've had the fortune of meeting most of the 'Kids in the Hall.' One meeting was special in particular because this was before I had gotten anything, before anything was clicking, and I just found myself hanging out with Scott Thompson.
With 'Nip/Tuck,' I had never even done anything before I got on that show. They created that character for me. I was reading for something else.
Erich Mendelsohn's drawings are expressive and beautiful. If he'd had the computers we have now, everything I've done he would have done before me. I would have had to figure out something else.
Fear can be good when you're walking past an alley at night or when you need to check the locks on your doors before you go to bed, but it's not good when you have a goal and you're fearful of obstacles. We often get trapped by our fears, but anyone who has had success has failed before.
Before, I was always the kid that was in the background. It was hard for me to get casted in even one program, and when people thought that I was a guest on a show for the first time when I had been on before, it saddened me. Suddenly getting the spotlight? That's! Not! True!