When I hit my 20s, I struggled to make it. I got married at 19, and my daughter, Je'Niece, was born a year later. I worked blue collar jobs during the day and comedy clubs at night, and I was earning about $25 a year doing stand-up.
I consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.
Americans donate blood every day - on high school and college campuses during blood drives, in workplaces after a coworker falls ill, and in hospitals as loved ones prepare for surgery.
You see these terrorists that are flying planes into buildings, right? You see our cities getting shot up in California. You see Paris getting shot up. And then somebody complains when a terrorist gets waterboarded, which quite frankly is no different than what happens on college campuses and frat houses every day.
I can see a day soon where you'll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world - some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh - paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion.
You can turn on Fox News almost any day and see some fictional story about voter fraud, the whole purpose of which is to limit voting by the poor, the elderly, college students and minorities.
There is a woman named Wendy Wood, who did a study when she was at Duke, and she followed around college students to try to figure out how much of their day was decision-making versus how much was habit. And what she found was that about 45 percent of all the behaviors that someone did in a day was habit.
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.
Just as somebody who lived through that campaign, I do believe that there was probably collusion. At least between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks... The Trump campaign was just way too ready to jump on whatever leak happened each day.
Nobody can quantify for you what's the impact of eating fiber every day, for instance. We can say we think it's good. But some people might say 'Oh, it reduces your risk of colon cancer by 20%, some people might say it reduces your risk by 25%.'
When I had cancer - of the colon first, followed by breast cancer and a mastectomy - my motto used to be 'Drips by day, Prada by night.' I felt that I had to grasp it in the same way as you'd take on any challenge.
I especially have very fond memories associated with the 10th day of Dassera. My friends and I would meet up and build this huge 7-feet-tall Ravan, which we'd burn at around sunset in our colony. And this was no ordinary Ravan. We'd actually sit and hand-mix the contents of glue and glitter with the dough and wrap it around newspaper for the base.
I ended up getting drafted by the Colorado Rockies on June 8, 2010 and the next day, my dad passed away, in June 9, 2010. So I'm at the biggest high of my life on June 8th. And the next day, June 9th, he's gone.
There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.
I always felt really guilty if I spent too much time playing video games. It's a colossal waste of time. And I can't say it's a very satisfying feeling at the end of the day, if you've spent eight hours playing a video game; you just end up feeling kind of spent, and used.
You know, songs often have a very coloured past. They might have something about them but it still doesn't work, so someone else adds a bit, and someone else adds a bit so perhaps one day I'll know its full history.
Every meal is so important and colours the rest of your day - my whole day can go into a spin if I make the wrong choice at lunchtime!
I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that's where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy's band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, 'You want to play?'
Columbia was a wonderful label for me. Wonderful. The records I made there garnered me an audience. I won a number of polls during the years that I was at Columbia. The Downbeat Jazz Poll. Leonard Feather, who was a huge critic back in the day, different polls that he had. The Playboy poll, a number of polls. So the music was great.
I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. I had to write five pages a day towards papers, or I would have to give up five dollars.
