KR
My dad said, “You’re going nowhere.” I was seven or eight.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 9 August 2025 source ↗
The question
What is the harshest thing anyone has said to you?Originally asked
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Others on this question
View all 122 →Glenda Jackson said I was an amateur during rehearsal for The White Devil at the Old Vic. I called her a cow, but that was inadequate.
There’s a tweet somewhere saying, “If you like Africa so much, why don’t you go back there.” It was because I dedicated one of my dances to my three mothers – Mother Africa, Mother Nature and my mother.
Olly Alexander
English singer and actor
It’s the stuff about my appearance that sticks. I read I had a face like a crumpled napkin and teeth that could till a field.
When I was a child, a member of staff at Wood End Assessment Centre [a former children’s home in Wigan] bellowed: “He copies them poems off of Bob Marley records.”
More from Kevin Rowland
View profile →My brother Pete passing on in 2005.
I worked in the stores of Edgware hospital when I was about 17, and it was grey and depressing.
The contentment I have now.
Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” – I think that’s true.
Insanity. I am on a recovery programme – clean from drugs and drink for many years – and if I stopped doing all that stuff I’d go crazy pretty quick and pick up drugs again, because I was a real fucking addict.
Gerry Adams, because he’s got incredible integrity and vision, and he’s had to put up with so much flak.
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