I was born on the other side of the tracks, in public housing in Brooklyn, New York. My dad never made more than $20,000 a year, and I grew up in a family that lost health insurance. So I was scarred at a young age with understanding what it was like to watch my parents lose access to the American dream.
There's something intrinsically Australian about a bunch of brothers and school friends getting together as a band at a very young age and all pulling together as a band at a very young age and all pulling together as mates to make something happen.
Two of my three siblings are older, so I suppose I learned from them and became a very avid reader at a young age, which I think enough cannot be said for what you can discover through literature.
If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.
From a young age, I understood the idea of balanced flavor - the reason you put ketchup on a hamburger. I was that kid who wouldn't eat something if there was something missing. I never really understood it until I began cooking professionally, balancing acids, sweets, spicy flavors and fat.
So my father was a person who never lied to me. If I had a question, he answered it. I knew a lot of things at a young age because I was intrigued.
Being nice to everybody, saying hello to everyone in the room, signing every autograph; it was instilled in me at a very young age that this was what I was suppose to do. But I don't think it helps at all. I see more people who are rude or arrogant being rewarded - but, this way, I can put my head on the pillow at night.
I don't think it should be allowed for people to start working at a young age and not take the time to just be living as themselves in the real world, especially now in this new age of new media and the obsession with celebrity. I think it's a real crime.
When sighted people cover their eyes or find themselves in a dark place, this is something that's very terrifying for us. And so in general, we assume that this is what blindness means. But of course, it isn't. For people who were born blind or who go blind at a very young age, that's not at all what blindness means.
From a very young age, militarism and trying to solve the world's problems through militarism is something that has always resonated with me as being a bad idea.