I took a year of karate. It was like obligatory... every kid was taking like one year of karate and one year of piano in my town. It was Bruce Lee and Liberace. But I was not a white belt. I graduated. I had a colour belt - but that's all you need to know. It could have been black, it could have been yellow, or it could have been anything in between.
Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.
I was born with this bow tie made of celluloid on my collar.
When I look at 'Napoleon Dynamite's style I'm reminded of how I spoke when I was an eight-year-old boy. It was just like capturing the essence of, 'Duh!' It was just like the stuff that I would say when I was like eight, nine, ten years old.
Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.
My mother was born in June and later, feeling a vacancy, chose her birth month for her middle name. Marry to marry, had kids because that's what was done. Liked crossword puzzles, liked lilac trees, liked baking in the sun, and liked Bing Crosby.
What's funny in 'The Mayor of MacDougal Street' is how Dave Van Ronk talks a lot about the time and how exciting it was and how electric it was.
I enjoyed school - although I ran away on the first day. I'd reminded the teacher that it was nearly time for 'Watch With Mother' on TV.
I have an old soul. I don't know any real-life lingo, so I have to take it from movies.
In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.
Growing up, we used to watch a lot of 'Indiana Jones' and 'Star Wars' and wear hand-me-down jeans and jumpers. I wasn't really one for dresses.
My whole family was - we grew up in New York, but all my relatives and all my father and stepfather's family, they were all from the South. So I like that old Black voice, and I love the sort of old Black man with a corncob pipe, sitting there telling a whopper.
A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
I was a very rotund child with short hair, and for some reason, I always had black ballet shoes. I was like the Wednesday Addams of ballet.
My earliest memory is dreamlike: in a small orchard or garden I am carried on the arm, I believe, of my father; there was a group of grown-ups, my mother among them, and the group was slowly walking in the orchard, it seems toward the house.
Although there were only about 24 episodes made it seems to run forever. They take a couple of episodes and put them together, making a feature film once in a while. I had good fun making the series.
I grew up in Pennsylvania in a small town. Real small, like one high school and one movie theater. Well, there was a state college there, that was the only good thing about it.
And just as it is with all proper grannies, she ordered me into my pink bunny jammies.
You have to understand, I grew up in the shadow of the Safeco tower.
Dad sometimes patted me on the knee and called me his Little Schmuck.
I don't ever remember not riding.
Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that’s who. They know where they are, do you, do you?
I was even more country in my college-band days.
I feel that this is a vocabulary that I grew up with. This biblical landscape is very familiar to me, and it's natural that I use those landmarks as references. Once they were universal references and everybody understood and knew them and located them. That's no longer the case today, but it is still my landscape.
There's something about New York. You can get a nice feeling of belonging as a writer here. It's probably the best city on Earth like that. I miss the wisecracking of New York.
