That was my aspiration, so I was there in a seminary with just boys who were studying to be priests. Pretty rigorous schooling; we never got home, we stayed there all year.
I wanted some family structure and stability, and that's what The Partridge Family afforded me, not only financially but in the fact that I could be at home with my kids.
I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.
Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.
But even though all this was going on at home, if someone had tried to take me away and put me in a children's home, I couldn't have handled it. Even though my mother was very brutal, it was my home.
I have serious concerns about whether it's prudent to give any foreign country substantial leverage over the U.S. economy. Instead of spending $80 billion on important programs here at home, we're sending this money overseas just to pay interest on our debt.
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
