If you can get humor and seriousness at the same time, you’ve created a special little thing, and that’s what I’m looking for, because if you get pompous, you lose everything.
After all those years of automatic success, you don’t get nervous any more. It’s really necessary to be nervous and be a little bit frightened. It pumps the adrenalin into you and you really get down there and try.
I feel I should try to reveal. When you hit it right, you produce an emotional response in the listener that can be cathartic. When you’re wrong, you’re soppy, sentimental.
Having a track record to live up to and the history of successes had become a hindrance. It becomes harder to break out of what people expect you to do.
In the clearing stands the boxer, and a fighter by his trade. And he carries a reminder of every glove that laid him down, or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his shame “I am leaving! I am leaving” but the fighter still remains.
