I've always loved playing with hair. I used to want dreads like Lauryn Hill, but my mom wouldn't let me.
I live with my family on the top of a hill in the country, and during the days, my house is quiet, save for the occasional excitement of the FedEx truck heading up the driveway. I write.
My parents wanted to name me Karim Hill. My aunt always liked the name Dule, from this actor Keir Dullea, who was in '2001: Space Odyssey.' That's how I got the name Karim Dule Hill. Growing up, I never liked the name Karim because people would ask me, 'Could you dunk like Kareem Abdul Jabbar?'
Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey.
Being positive is like going up a mountain. Being negative is like sliding down a hill. A lot of times, people want to take the easy way out, because it's basically what they've understood throughout their lives.
My background was always more soulful pop. I was named after Ella Fitzgerald, and when I was a kid, I was listening to Lauryn Hill, Etta James, Joss Stone. For me, it was always about the voice.
I would never make a purely autobiographical movie, because it would be incredibly boring. But I always bring something. It's usually some emotional truth I've experienced, like in 'Get Him to the Greek,' the relationship between Jonah Hill and Elisabeth Moss, I had certainly had that kind of relationship with a girlfriend.
In Peter Ackroyd's book 'London: The Biography,' he describes the route of the medieval wall that enclosed the original city. Take the book and follow it from the Tower of London via the Barbican to Ludgate Hill. You experience the real history of London.
It would have been easier to have a male protagonist, but I didn't want people to assume that Nikki Hill was me in her entirety because a lot of people just don't like me and I don't think they would be interested in reading about me, even in the fictional context.
We did that with people like Chris Rock, Woody Harrelson, and the environmentalist Julia Butterfly Hill.
I do mourn my characters. I wrote an essay once where I was sure that far back in a marsh there was a hummock - a little hill of hardwoods - and an old farm house, where all the heroines in my novels lived together with all my beloved dead dogs. I've discussed this with my therapist, naturally. He says it's okay in fair amounts.
I tape every game I can get my hands on. Every game that's on TV, I tape it. My daughter, Terry Hill, lives in Eureka, and she has a satellite dish, so she tapes what I can't get. I try to keep up with what everybody is doing, so if the phone rings, I'll be ready.
I live in the country, so I get a fair amount of exercise. We heat our house with wood, so I split wood. We also live on a steep hill, and I have to rake and put in cross-stitches to keep the road from washing out when there's a big rain.
I never figured I'd go into the Hall of Fame. A kid from the Hill.
Technically, my first acting job was in one of my videos for a song called 'Retrospect For Life,' which Lauryn Hill directed and featured an actress by the name of N'bushe Wright, who played my girlfriend who was about to be pregnant. I remember being so nervous about it, but now I feel like I can conquer the world with it.
In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified PFC on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent.
I really enjoyed staying at an encampment at the top of a hill in the Samburu Reserve in Kenya. You reach it on a small plane; there is no electricity, no city noises and you sleep and shower under the Milky Way, with moths fluttering around a kerosene lamp, knowing that there are elephants and lions roaming free in the valley.
Whenever I'm driving through an area of a town, and it gets really foggy, my brain immediately starts having anxiety because of 'Silent Hill.'
If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
At the close of the day when the hamlet is still, and mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove, when naught but the torrent is heard on the hill, and naught but the nightingale's song in the grove.
