I was 15 when I did Rufio and now I've been Rufio for more of my life than I haven't been. Wrestling with that is always interesting because you don't want to be fully defined by it, but at the same time it's you, and you don't want to be ashamed of you either.

I'll be walking down the street with a mate, and someone will stop and say 'All right Crouchy, how's things?' and so on. Once they're gone, the person I'm with will say 'Do you know them?' and I'll say 'I've never met them before in my life'. Happens all the time.

I've always been someone with a small circle of friends. Each stretch of my life has been defined by one person who was just my person. We became inseparable for a certain number of years, and that time was our season, just the two of us making our way through life.

Throughout my life, there's just periods when I write and periods when I don't. I don't feel like anything's really blocked. It's just not where things are at right now, and it's just a matter of time until there's something going on where I feel compelled to write.

I often have to play a role to get what I want in my life. At the same time, I can't do that without also nourishing who I really am and being aware of my true self and the ways in which I'm not bound by my race or sexual orientation or class or country or whatever.

When I moved to New York at 22, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I took an improv class, and the first scene I did, I felt like 'I want to do this for the rest of my life.' It was the first time I ever felt like that about anything. I tried to make a living off improv.

I'd have to say that Nixon feels like the public figure who most dominated my life - from the time I went to fourth grade wearing a Nixon-Lodge button in the fall of 1960, through my college years, which overlapped with Kent State, Cambodia, the China trip and all the rest.

I'm going to continue doing what I want to do. And if it means I want to go and make a big movie, if it has something to say, I will want to make it. I don't want to spend my life wasting my time. If it's a big movie, I want to do it. If it's a small movie, I want to do it.

Your subconscious mind is trying to help you all the time. That's why I keep a journal - not for chatter but for mostly the images that flow into the mind or little ideas. I keep a running journal, and I have all of my life, so it's like your gold mine when you start writing.

If I would characterize my life, I would say that I was a very lucky actor who came into very lucky times, and got to Hollywood, and was put under contract by Warners in the very last days of the studio contract era, and was privileged to go through that time which is gone now.

I want to do musician things and start making this my life. I want to learn - there's so much I have to learn about what it takes to be a recording artist, about what it takes to go on tour. I want to take this time and be a sponge and start meeting people and start - just start.

The book is called 'Thanks for Nothing' and it's really the story of how I got into comedy and traces back every strand in my life that is relevant to that story. It's kind of an autobiography but isn't, as it stops about 25 years ago. It goes right up to the first time I do stand up.

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.

Looking at the Batman pages is like revisiting my youth. My first seven years in New York were the first seven years of Batman itself. While my time on Batman was important and exciting and notable considering the characters that came out of it, it was really just the start of my life.

My favorite dark comedy, which is also one of my favorite films of all time, is 'After Hours.' I've seen 'After Hours' as much as almost any film I've ever seen in my life; I've watched it dozens of times, and I still watch it once a year. I still get a thrill out of it every time I see it.

I got to make 'Trishakti' with Arshad Warsi, who was a newcomer at that time. The movie took three years to complete and became dated by the time it was released. The movie did not even get a proper release and bombed at the box office. It was a very bad patch of my life and a big disaster for my career.

For the first time in my life I tried whale. It was very chewy and quite fatty. My friend had had whale before, so I knew it would be quite blubbery. It was delicious. I loved it. It was smoked, so it had a lovely kind of tangy taste to it. We had it a couple of nights. I was won over. It was very yummy.

Mentally, I'm really strong, but for maybe the first time in my life, I cried about my career because I thought it was over. When you've been out for a year, and you think it's over, you think completely differently after that. I was just looking on TV, and I wasn't able to train, and in the meantime, I had a son.

I was a decent 800 m. runner, not 400 - and I'm actually really proud of this: I beat the girls and the boys to win my school 800, so it was a big deal at the time; I was about 11. Then I won the district and made it to state, but I just never went, because I was training, and tennis was a big part of my life at that point.

I auditioned in Chicago for Juilliard and didn't get in. I was basically living in a back room of my parents' house, paying rent and not doing anything with my life. I'd like to say it was patriotic to join the Marines, but it was also that I was doing nothing honorable with my life and spending too much time at McDonald's.

I used to think that when I finished a book, I was finished with it. But it's like a wonderful Hydra. Every time a head disappears, more heads appear, so I will be writing for the rest of my life. The more books I write, the more books I find that I still have to write about. I use it like an inspiration, and that's wonderful.

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