A Quote by Mark Strong

I was born in Islington and grew up in Islington, so Arsenal was all around me, and supporting them was kind of unavoidable. The first season I started going to watch them was when we did the Double in 1971, so my first heroes were Charlie George, Ray Kennedy, and John Radford.
Not a lot of people know I wrote the lyrics for the Arsenal club song, 'Good Old Arsenal'. We had a competition on ITV for it, and none of the entries were any good, so I approached their manager, Bertie Mee, and asked him if he would let me have a stab. He did, and within a few weeks they were singing it at Wembley on the way to the 1971 double.
I was going to do medicine at Edinburgh University - when I was three weeks old I nearly died, but they did an operation and I survived. It was a huge thing for my family - I was the first-born - and doctors were heroes, so I wanted to join them.
The Ramones were a great bunch of guys. They were very quiet, very shy. They were a little in awe of the filmmaking process, probably because we started at 7 a.m. I do remember the very first day of shooting, I met them and did the scene in the bedroom where Joey sings to me, and they were all scattered around my bedroom in my little fantasy scene. That was the first scene we shot of the movie. That scene is kind of a strange way to start a movie. "Okay, get undressed, and these weird guys in leather jackets and ripped jeans are going to sing to you."
The fields from Islington to Marybone, To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood, Were builded over with pillars of gold; And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.
The Beatles were huge. And the first thing they said when you interviewed them, 'Oh yeah, we grew up on Motown.'..They were the first white act to admit they grew up listening to black music.
When I was starting out, it seemed like there were so many girls who were known by their first names, who were unique, who all had idiosyncrasies and characteristics that made them individual. Those girls stuck around; you'd work with them season after season. But now it's completely different.
I started doing stand-up at the age of 20. This was back in 1976, around the time (coincidence?) that the first comedy clubs were starting. The young comedians of today gasp when I tell them how many shows I did that first year: 500. Five nights a week.
I was brought up in a council flat in Islington with only an outside lavatory. And there were plenty of kids I knew who later ended up in prison.
We grew up in Islington, north London, in a Georgian terraced house that nowadays would be split into flats. Our grandparents lived upstairs, there was another tenant living up there and downstairs was the office where people in the area paid their rent.
Whenever I would see horror movies I would be traumatized and I'd have to watch them behind my hands or behind the couch sometimes. So I grew up first with authors like John Bellairs and R.L. Stine for kind of the young adult horror. But I found Stephen King in the sixth grade and that was it. I became a rabid fan.
I'm a first-born child of a Chinese immigrant family, I grew up on the East Coast. And I have to admit, I did not grow up around technology.
I don't drive around London much. Any journey around Islington involves hundreds of speed bumps that seem to tear the bottom of your car off.
'George' exploits John Kennedy Jr.'s cult of celebrity at a time when Americans are hungry for icons, not heroes.
The people I grew up around, almost all of them had been born and raised in the South. And, you know, they didn't always go to church, but they lived their lives as if God were watching everything they did.
I dont drive around London much. Any journey around Islington involves hundreds of speed bumps that seem to tear the bottom of your car off.
A lot of it was, you know, you look for moments where, for instance, we were dependent on Abraham Lincoln making sure that the slaves were freed or John Kennedy bringing civil rights, or the first one I wrote about, George Washington trying to stop the British from invading and ending this country before it even began. Those were turning points where, if you had not had a president stepping up to the plate, if there wasn't a story like that, we would not be here.
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