When I'm the happiest, my desk is not neat. It has lots of pens and the books I love. It gets messy when I'm in the flow. So many houses are so neat.
As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.
The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
'Hunger Games' is a tried-and-true tale about a totalitarian society. It's more similar to China than America, but it's also similar to Nazi Germany and anywhere where the populace gets semi-brainwashed into serving the agenda of a very few.
When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way.
The world gets better every day - then worse again in the evening.
I think it seems to be when I'm trusted, and someone just lets me have free rein - 'Do what you want, man' - that kind of confidence that directors instil in me always gets my best stuff out.
When a piece gets difficult, make faces.
4chan is a framework of pictures and text. I've always been extremely hands-off with dictating what gets posted, past general categories and rules. I support providing a place to discuss anything, although I don't agree with everything that's posted.
I am fine playing 'Law & Order' and even the 'Jurassic' movies to be straight up, as far as the characters being portrayed there, but I never want to stay in straight-up land too long. I always wanted to do something where the character's world gets to be explored.
It is so killer to collaborate with someone who gets what you're trying to say.
I believe that hunger for a 'lost dimension' of experience is a natural yearning in all of us, and it doesn't go away just because we ignore it. It is evidenced among other places in the millions of children and adults who obsessively read the 'Harry Potter' books. It is said that fiction is where someone gets to tell the truth.
Remember that the fans want to hear inside stuff about the series; they don't want to hear gripes and grouses about your personal life. What they really want to hear is how the series gets made, and how you interact with your fellow cast members.
There's a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time. that's true of all types of consumer electronics.
If the white man gives you anything - just remember when he gets ready he will take it right back. We have to take for ourselves.
The game Rock Band has been haunting me like a bad ring tone. It gets stuck in my head and momentarily effaces all that I love about music.
Nobody gets any fun out of baseball any more. I guess a kid's crazy not to be serious about it when he's drawing down $20,000 or $30,000 a year, and any smart-aleck gag you try may be your last. But what's life without a laugh?
Radio is a really strange business now, too. There's a very narrow door and a very few people control what gets played.
I have always noticed that a man who gives the most for the money, gets the most business.
What gets lost is we wouldn't be who we are and as successful as we have been if we didn't have a decent batting average.
Of all the depressing abuses of language in business, there is none that gets me so incensed as the rampant overuse of the word 'passionate' in company slogans, marketing blurbs, mission statements and on the sides of vans.
I would bring a $100 bill, and I would say, 'Alright, first person' - and everybody has their iPhone - and I would say, 'First person to find in the Constitution the phrase 'separation of church and state' gets this $100 bill'... And you know what - and everybody knows that, right? - that phrase isn't in the U.S. Constitution. It's nowhere.
One of the few advantages to not being beautiful is that one usually gets better-looking as one gets older; I am, in fact, at this very moment, gaining my looks.
The more people have, the less content they seem to be. In America, the cultural expectation that we're to be happy all the time and our children are to be happy all the time is toxic, and I think that really gets in the way of emotional well-being.
Women who wear kimonos, when the fight, they have to keep their knees together, and when they use a sword, they have to move the sleeves otherwise it gets caught.
It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.
Nixon had some large achievements in foreign affairs. They will be remembered. But a president probably gets remembered for one thing, and Watergate will head the Nixon list, I suspect.
A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.
Baseball always gets credit for the foundational part of masculinity - the father thing. The eternal game of backyard catch, 'Field of Dreams', the Ripkens, the Griffeys, the Bondses, so on. But football is the real paternal game, because it's a conveyor belt of father figures, in the form of coaches.
For me, until I know that the audience really gets what I'm trying to communicate I'm not done.
I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
I see it all the time in politics. If a candidate gets caught in a lie, he quickly tries to change the subject by throwing more mud at his opponent. The mud keeps flying until some of the slanderous material sticks.
You need a great idea, but then you've got to carry it through. If you get it right, you're going to be a critical success. But not everyone who works hard gets it right, or has the success they deserve: there's an element of luck.
The crowd is a pretty good indicator when it's good, because it's kind of a universal energy that gets passed around.
I love to sing old Motown songs to myself, or some Patti Smith Edith Piaf or Billie Holiday. That gets me in the mood for singing.
