I was taught the alphabet by my aunts before I was four years old, and I was reading the Bible in class and beginning geography when I was six.
With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.
I remember very well, when I was at Oxford, an old gentleman said to me, "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task.
Many billions of years will elapse before the smallest, youngest stars complete their nuclear burning and shrink into white dwarfs. But with slow, agonizing finality perpetual night will surely fall.
My desire at Liverpool was to help get the club playing in the elite because they had been five years without it. We used to talk about it in the dressing room. If Liverpool are not in the Champions League, it is difficult to get the best players to come to the club.
I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76. 5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.
When I started off many years ago, I made a determination that there were certain roles I didn't want to play.
Touring for two years is excruciating.
I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships.
Just a few short years ago in the year 2000, the last full fiscal year of the Clinton administration, this country was running a surplus of $236 billion.
Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what. " "My mother didn't love me. " So what. "My husband won't ball me. So what. "I'm a success but I'm still alone. " So what. I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.
You see, in America, it's quite standard for an actor to sign, at the beginning of a series, for five or seven years. The maximum any British agent will allow you to have over an actor is three years.
They understand what their market is and who they should be selling records to, and most importantly, they know the kind of artist that they want to be, but they have to do it themselves. You don't want a 13-year-old singing some awful song from a musical.
When we were in the seminary we got a stipend direct from the government and for that stipend we had an obligation to stick to our teaching job for five years.
But recently I've, the past few years, I'm more focused on meditation. It's not a physical part. It's more mental part, to understand life.
I had years of experience that I still needed to accumulate and go through.
If you are British, you soon get used to people not loving you. The Irish remind us of offenses from 100 years ago. Perhaps we should react to what the French did to us even longer ago.
I held a variety of jobs - most notably ten years working in universities - and kept on writing.
Over the years, however, the research evidence keeps piling up, and it points strongly to the conclusion that a high degree of empathy in a relationship is possibly the most potent and certainly one of the most potent factors in bringing about change and learning.
I've never been healthier. I haven't had a cigarette in two years. I run four or five miles, four or five times a week. I've been healthy and having a really good time.
