Bondage is of the mind; freedom too is of the mind. If you say 'I am a free soul. I am a son of God who can bind me' free you shall be.
The slavery at Bufford's was too fresh in my recollection to let me care to bind myself again. From the time that I took my nose off that lithographic stone, I have had no master, and never shall have any.
Don't get me wrong. I don't take anything for granted. But it seems like the better I play, the more attention I get. And I can't get away from it. You play great, you get attention. But I hate attention. It is weird. I'm in a bind. The more you win, the more they come.
I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.
Love is a binding force, by which another is joined to me and cherished by myself.
When I was a child, I loved 'The Marble Faun' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it was because it had a beautiful binding. When you're a kid, you like books because they're pretty to look at, and this one had a white calfskin cover and gold edges. That was enough to make me love it.
I often talked to Bing Crosby, and while I liked him, I never understood why he was so popular. To me his voice was just a gimmick.
I don't think I've ever actually written from inspiration, actually had a song just go, 'Bing!' I only recall that happening to me twice - once was with 'Terrapin' and the other was 'Wharf Rat.' I mean, that's twice in a lifetime of writing!
A lot of people influenced me as I was learning, but probably Bing Crosby was the most influential because I would hear his Christmas albums, which my parents played a lot.
All through high school and college, my parents would ask me over and over again, 'What are you going to do with your life? What do you want to be?' Well, in my heart I wanted to be a singer like Bing, but I worried about the reality of that dream. Did I think for one minute that I had the voice to pull it off? Of course not.
My parents were into The Mills Brothers, Perry Como, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Sarah Vaughn, and all those people sung the most wonderful songs - and even when I got into rock 'n' roll, that stayed with me.
I was never a joiner. I tried - I had people I admired and liked and wanted to hang with, but I ended up starting a theatre company and that took me back to Chicago... I guess I wasn't a scenester in the end. Something must have worked out right, as I'm still here - but I'm only a binge socialite.
People ask me if there are going to be stories of Harry Potter as an adult. Frankly, if I wanted to, I could keep writing stories until Harry is a senior citizen, but I don't know how many people would actually want to read about a 65 year old Harry still at Hogwarts playing bingo with Ron and Hermione.
I was the sixteen-year-old driving everyone to bingo and shopping. It was quite a responsibility. It made me the man in charge of a lot of things.
I grew up in Harlem, and the kids used to tease me. You know that song 'Bingo'? Well, they used to sing, 'V-i-n-g-o, and Vingo was his name-o.'
I've had every kind of humiliation, from playing in Gala Bingo halls to doing a PA in a Glaswegian nightclub and having cans of lager thrown at me.
For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn't just bigger, it was better. There were mountains and valleys and craters and shadows. And it came alive.
Biochemical interactions are very interesting to me.
It drives me crazy when people talk about the scale as an indicator of health, because your weight doesn't tell you what's going on at a biochemical level.
It was an extremely trying time for me. Best was still intimate with MacLeod and the others about the laboratory. I was out of the picture entirely. MacLeod had taken over the whole physiological investigation. Collip had taken over the biochemistry. Professor Graham and Dr. Campbell had taken over the whole clinical aspect of the investigation.
