The first time Calypso came to check on [Leo], it was to complain about the noise. “Smoke and fire,” she said. “Clanging on metal all day long. You’re scaring away the birds!” “Oh, no, not the birds!
He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.
I liked Berkeley tremendously, Berkeley was a very leftist campus. I came to love that city as much as I love Paris or the south of France or New York.
I'm street smart. You can't con me. But that's just from living in New York. Now if a guy came from Mississippi somewhere, Ohio somewhere, to New York City for the first time, he don't have the street smarts. You can take him.
I've always known I would be a success, but I was surprised at the way it came.
Going vegan was a little tougher for me. The final push came from watching Gary Yourofsky's lecture at Georgia Tech in person. The video is now on YouTube. I constantly show it to people interested in learning about why I choose to live the way I do.
My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.
I just wanted a song to sing, and there came a point where I couldn't sing anything. . . nobo dy else was writing what I wanted to sing. I couldn't find it anywhere. If I could I probably would never have started writing.
I think my biggest break though came probably on Patriot Games because it was the biggest, longest second unit up to that point. It was like five months of shooting and a huge crew.
I was taking chemical engineering. But I went into the army after that. When I came out of the army, I was a different person. I met a lot of good jazz players in the army.
Neither an assembly line nor a stock market nor an oil well did it, simply what came from one small skull and that one right hand.
The fools that came in here brought their beach gear to a cave. . . go figure.