For me, the great problem growing up in England was that I had a very narrow concept of what God can be, and it was damn close to an old man with a beard.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Growing up, the way that I looked was very important to me. I was always trying to impress people, and when I grew my beard there was a certain freedom, a separation, getting past this the way I looked, identify myself as a spiritual seeker.
I grew up with a very religious background.
I remember going to see Billy Graham in a cinema in Glasgow, and he was down in London. I used to go and hear preachers, and then we always went to church and Sunday school. That mattered a lot to me.
My father leaving the family shaped who I was and how I looked at the world. By the same token, my father telling me fairy tales that he had made up shaped me profoundly, too.
At the Harvard Business School, I really felt I had gained the ability to resolve difficult issues. But I also felt that I wasn't in the mainstream with my fellow students. During job-hunting season, for example, everybody shaved their beards for interviews. I thought, 'This is crazy.' So I grew a beard.
My father was a little frightening - a huge man, six foot four - and he looked like God. He was always a visitor, as far as I was concerned, because my parents separated when I was nine. We only became friends when he was old and began to shrink. During the war, he was a BBC war correspondent and did some extraordinary broadcasts.
When I was young, I was religious.
I had the only beard in the Western Hemisphere that made Bob Dylan's look good.
God, for example, appealed to me as a beardless man wearing a quilted silk cap; holiness was something burning, forbidding, something connected with fire while a day had the form of an oblong box.
Growing up in Wales was a pretty Draconian experience with religion.