What is an adult? A child blown up by age.
In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.
From the earliest age, I was just different. I think that's part of every writer's little revenge. You think, 'I'm not a blonde, blue-eyed cheerleader but I'm going to get out of here and do something.'
There are a lot of female artists my age around at the moment, but they're all American and blonde and blue-eyed and smiley. I'm totally the opposite of that. I want to show a bit more attitude and I have an opinion.
I had just discovered jazz, and I started singing in a kind of blues cover band at the age of 15. We called ourselves - it was a terrible name - the Blue Zoots. We couldn't actually get our hands on zoot suits, nor did we dress in blue. We did covers of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and kind of Blues Brothers repertoire stuff.
Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.
I left home at 17, traveled. I got married when I was 21. That's a young age. As it turned out, things were fine, then not so fine, and then it was a blunder. That happens all the time.
Major actions by courageous and wise men will be necessary to avoid our continuing to blunder into the space age like unenlightened and selfish idiots.
A child's sense of reality vs. fantasy can be a bit blurred at the preschool age.
I went to boarding school, and what that teaches you is to cope emotionally at a young age and to suppress a lot of emotion. Being in the army is, in a way, similar.
I went to boarding school from the age of eight - first to prep school, then to Eton. One thing that kind of education teaches you is community living: there's little retreat. That's why people come out of it and talk about lifelong friendships forged in the furnace.
There is a latent anger in a lot of people that went to boarding school at an early age. I was eight. And I loved it over the five years, but I think the adjustments for eight-year-olds are a lot. And I think it informs who you are for a long, long time.
I kind of struggled as a 10-year-old to make out what it meant that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed within two months of each other. I think I was 14 when Watergate happened and a president was impeached. So between my birth and age 14, I just saw a lot of turmoil.
For me, my body image struggle started very young. All that I heard from my mother, my aunts, and my mom's friends was, 'I gotta lose five pounds.' At 5 years old, I learned a size 2 is not thin enough. It was, 'Don't eat carbs! Don't eat sugar! Drink Diet Coke! You always diet!' So that was engrained in my brain at a very early age.
You need some insecurity if you're an actor. It keeps the pot boiling. I haven't yet started to think about retiring. I was shocked when I heard about Paul Newman retiring at age 82. Most actors just fade away like old soldiers.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
I often compare myself as a kid to my own grandchildren, who are around 11 and 14 now. That's the age kids usually read my book. And I remember myself; we'd gone through a world war. My father was an army officer so I was aware of what was going on. But I wasn't bombarded with images of catastrophe like many kids are today.
'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.
From an early age, I had always loved drawing. Laying on the floor, in front of the fire, drawing from my imagination, marching soldiers, dive bombers, spaceships and monsters. Now, suddenly, I was drawing from real life!
I never wanted to be a bombshell; I wanted to be an actor. I would much prefer to be a woman than a man, but if I was a dude, maybe I'd have Johnny Depp's island because women in this industry after a certain age definitely don't get to do 'Pirates of the Caribbean.'
