People say I'm arrogant or cocky. You know what it is? I feel that I have a good chance to win ball games.
I was a good baseball player. I still play a couple of times a week as part of my daily workout. Just throwing the ball, running around, fielding ground balls, you know. It's better to me than being on a treadmill or some sort of Zumba class.
I wanted to definitely be a musician or a good preacher or a heck of a baseball player. I couldn't play ball too good - I hurt my finger, and I stopped that. I couldn't preach, and well, all I had left was getting into the music thing.
My love was Bob Dylan, but as I got older I realized a good ballad was a good ballad.
When I'm playing live, I'll rip out a ballad from my album, and I'll play that solo on the piano, which feels really good because it kind of takes me back to when I was younger.
I started singing before I started talking. And that's the God's honest truth. I think it was something that I've always loved to do, even if I wasn't good at it. I just loved ballads.
To become a classical ballerina, you have to move to New York when you're 12 or 11 and that becomes your life. I just wanted to be good in my company in Charleston and I wanted it to always be part of my life.
Figure skating is an unlikely Olympic event but its good television. It's sort of a combination of gymnastics and ballet. A little sexy too which doesn't hurt.
It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.
How can you live the high life if you do not wear high heels? I don't understand why women wear these ballet pumps. They are only good if you walk like a ballet dancer, and only ballet dancers do that.
What guarantees - or at least semi-guarantees - good ballets is good choreographers, and they are thin on the ground.
Tolstoy may be right about happy and unhappy families, but in ballet, it works the opposite way: All good ballets are different from each other and all bad ones are alike, at least in one crucial respect - they're all empty.
My mother praised me when I did something good, and then the next moment, she would say, 'Don't float.' She put me in a balloon and then pricked it.
So I studied a lot with the balloon, and in learning how to sing with other musicians and keep in time - that's all by touch. A lot of that I feel in my body, and growing up with hearing I have pretty good muscle memory, and I was born with near perfect pitch.
I'm a big Penn & Teller fan. But I myself was never very good; I was a teenage magician who performed at kids' parties. I can still perform a vanish, credibly, and I still, in special circumstances, will make a balloon animal.
All I really try and do is live up to my potential and do as well as I possibly could and to bring to the ballpark each and every day a good effort and do the best that I could each and every day.
Reading isn't good for a ballplayer. Not good for his eyes. If my eyes went bad even a little bit I couldn't hit home runs. So I gave up reading.
Roger Maris was as good a man and as good a ballplayer as there ever was.
If you can do that - if you run, hit, run the bases, hit with power, field, throw and do all other things that are part of the game - then you're a good ballplayer.
The only thing I'd ever wanted in my life was to be a major-league ballplayer, but I had to admit to myself that I wasn't good enough. It broke my heart.
