My entire life, my grandmother told me I could do whatever I set my mind to.

I don't mind being the center of attention as a character but in real life it's not for me.

For me, speaking my mind is a big part of my life, and I encourage other people to do that as well.

When I came out, everybody in my life that said they loved me unconditionally turned around and said, 'Never mind!'

My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.

I don't really mind any scrutiny. It doesn't bother me. I'm going to still live my life and do everything I do the same way and not lose any sleep.

I had made up my mind to find a woman to share my life: one who would leave London altogether and go with me into the green country and be satisfied.

To me, they are equally important, as they represent a certain period in my life and times. With that in mind, it really is impossible to pick favorites.

I can't imagine not reporting. It's such a habit of mind for me, I do it even in my social life. If I'm nervous at a party, I just start interviewing people.

In every circumstance, all my life, my mind shows me the possible bad outcome: someone walks down steps, and before I can do anything to head the image off, I see a fall, a catastrophe.

Getting older, I realize I've had a very fortunate life. I've had a budget that's allowed me to do just about any silly little thing the mind could conjure up, and I'm still alive and here.

That's where I get my toughness in mind. From my background when I was young, everything I've been through, everything I was going through in my life. It helped me a lot, it helped me to be strong.

When my life is stressful, my favorite game is called 'Pop It,' where you pop balloons and prizes fall out. It's a five-minute game that focuses my mind and gives me extra attention when I'm stressed.

I've been in Africa, America, moving around a lot. It's helped me to open up my mind. I was born in Jamaica; I've lived all my life there and got all I could from Jamaica. But I needed to be somewhere else to grow.

Things never go the way you expect them to. That's both the joy and frustration in life. I'm finding as I get older that I don't mind, though. It's the surprises that tickle me the most, the things you don't see coming.

What cracks me up is people who think I don't take baseball seriously. It's the most important thing in my life. They don't know how hard it is for me to get a bad game out of my mind. I still can't, but I'm getting better.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

I think the 'sunken place' - that term is what I hear when I'm just casually living my life. People say it around me. Not because they're around me; they're saying it because it articulated a state of mind. Lil Wayne's rapped about it.

When I left for college, I put Miami behind me and tried to have a life of the mind. I got a graduate degree. I traveled. I even married a fellow writer, whose only real estate was a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Paris, where we lived.

I've been fortunate with my acting career. A lot of scripts come to me. I don't mind auditioning if something that requires that, but I haven't had to in awhile, which is a nice place to be 'cause I've been on quite a lot of auditions in my life.

I didn't want to be behind a desk. I didn't want to do a normal job. I had made my mind up. I became despondent prematurely. I had my mid-life crisis when I was 16. I suppose I'd agree with that. But acting has helped me develop a lot in my private life.

I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.

There was this song I was working on called 'Swing.' It was almost finished, but there was something missing, and I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. And then this little piece of information - this little tweet - came to the forefront of my mind.

There's a lot of weight on the shoulders of a single parent, and that's taken a lot of energy away from me. It was always in the back of my mind that I had to do it, and I couldn't count on anybody. There was no one around to pay for me to get through life.

My mind was so geared towards being a performing artist, singing all these classical pieces, but the sense of loneliness I got when I moved from New York to El Paso meant that writing turned into singing. I'd sing all these songs, and they'd make me feel better. Songs that crafted the way my life was going to go.

When I was younger, I didn't have the finer things in life. It was around me - the cars, the jewelry and all of that. But I didn't have it. So I did bad things to get what I wanted. Going to jail never crossed my mind. I wish it had. When I was locked up, my mother didn't support me because she couldn't accept who I was and where I was.

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