Quotes About Transition

Well I started out as a dancer, so I was used to this performing - performance arts. Started out getting used to being on stage. As I got a lot older that became public speaking or debate.

I spent a whole 12 years helping other people tell their stories as a publicist, so just to be able to go and write and get behind the camera, that's my thing.

I used to work at a label. I used to be a publicist. I used to be at a management company.

I used to be an actor, I used to be a journalist and I used to be a publicist. I know how all these people think.

I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.

My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.

I couldn't get published for three years. Then the times changed: glasnost, perestroika. So, for three years, I wasn't allowed to publish 'The Unwomanly Face of War,' but then it changed.

I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.'

Digitization is certainly challenging the old ways of doing things, whether that's in publishing or politics. But it's not the end. In many ways, it is just the beginning.

When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing.

Cars did not kill off horses. Digital publishing will not kill off books.

Before the arrival of my first son, I gave up on the moribund business of magazine publishing, where I had long dreamed of a career, and went to work in advertising. That I could be paid great money to write was incredibly hard to believe.

The age of 18 seemed the right time to try something different in my life. Moving to the U.K. was a risk, and I was never confident that I could ever make a full-time living being a musician, but I had to try. Initially, I worked as a jazz musician in pubs or with bands.

I was only a young whippersnapper at that point. I was in pubs playing Barry Manilow songs. I didn't know what to expect.

Dick Dart emerged from the ether during a flight from New York with my wife and children to Puerto Rico.

When you're in a situation that is foreign to you, you just have to pull yourself together and adapt.

I really had a rough time in middle school. Middle school to me was the way most people explain high school. Then in high school I had a blast. I basically did everything that you would do in high school or in college, so it really wasn't a difficult thing to pull out.

When you are a child, your father is God to you. Then, as you grow up, you have different gods. You change. But does it really matter? All of the roads lead to the same place, and if you are going in the right direction, it doesn't matter what you are taking - a jet plane or a cart pulled by a donkey.

When I was growing up in north-west London, our milkman's cart was pulled by a horse, and cattle still grazed on the meadows near Church Farm.

I got hurt my senior year of college. I ended up breaking my fifth metatarsal after I pulled out of the Draft. That was a good experience for me to kind of find myself, figure out a plan for post-basketball because obviously it doesn't last forever.

After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.

I'm basically a dancer and cinema just happened to me, sometimes I still wonder how I could become an actor. My friends too keep asking how I pulled it off.

Pulling away from your parents, that's the natural thing to do; that's how life progresses.

After leaving the Obama administration, I guess I got tired of pulling my hair out over Trump and the Republican Congress and thought I needed to do something practical about it.