What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.
That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move.
When I work alone, it can be like dabbling with a canvas. Maybe you paint over bits, and it starts to form its own life and lead you off in a direction. It becomes an intuitive, subconscious process.
With theater, depending on the audience, the show is different every night and really requires your constant concentration. With film, it's more possible to focus for shorter, more intense bits of time.
The only difficult thing is learning to recognise the interesting bits from those millions of moments life provides you with every day and writing down those snippets.
When I was doing 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' I was asked, 'If there was one part of your life that you could erase, what would it be?' And I was so stunned by that. I thought: 'Nothing.' I would keep all the good bits and the bad bits, because those things made me who I am.
I spent years doing 'Star Trek' bits and things, and a lot of people loved it, a lot of people mocked it.
The action-movie genre is a very difficult one to get satiated in terms of your acting bits.
So I have the classic amateur's technique; I know some very tricky bits and I have large gaping holes.
I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill... as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything.
Every chef has his treats. By that, I mean bits and pieces from things you're working on - crusty little cake trimmings, ends from a brisket, collars from a salmon, scraps. But they're snacks to me, and I eat them right off the cutting board - maybe too much.
Actually, parts of New Zealand remind me of Suffolk. There's not many flat bits, but just the atmosphere there. There's a kind of a core tranquility about it, a kind of assuredness that this is fairly close to approaching the perfect way to be.
I work out the other bits, too, but I need to know what I look like, very early on. And then it's like a template; I'll fill that person out. If I get that out of the way, then I'm all right.
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
I've got one idea I want to do for a film and you know I just enjoy myself doing bits and pieces.
I take little bits and pieces of ideas that I may or may not believe in but I give them to this character and he runs with them. I have fun with however he handles the situation.
I really want to feel that I'm in a very balanced and good place in my life. And I do feel that. But I think it's always important to learn and draw little bits of inspiration from wherever we can.
All of my characters tend to be montages of different people I've met: little bits and pieces of their personalities put together.
If you look at any creative person's work, you can see bits and pieces of their influences. That's what an artist does.
Even the cleanest air, at the centre of the South Pacific or somewhere over Antarctica, has two hundred thousand assorted bits and pieces in every lungful. And this count rises to two million or more in the thick of the Serengeti migration, or over a six-lane highway during rush hour in downtown Los Angeles.
Now I've got a fairly good grasp of the 18th century on what was common and what people thought. But I don't write in order. I write bits and pieces and sort of glue them.
I can understand there are things like shadows they need to fix after a shoot, but it's unfair to represent an image of yourself if it's not true. They're gonna see what you look like on film anyway, so why try to cover all your wobbly bits in a photo?
I believe in Buddhism. Not every aspect, but most of it. So I take bits and pieces.
I did an audiobook for 'Rough Crossings,' which I thought was one of the best books I had published. But it was an absolute embarrassment to read it. All these horrible mucked-up bits of syntax, over-the-top adjectives. I found myself editing it while reading. Alert listeners will notice the difference.
Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
Distributers don't need massive amounts of square feet to stock digital products. Retailers don't need brick-and-mortar stores to sell them. The entire supply chain for these select items has been permanently dematerialized. The marketplace has been blown to bits.
To make films is as boring as watching paint dry - you usually have to do little tiny bits here and there. You go off waiting for lighting, you come back - the energy dies. You hope you can find someone who can keep it going.
There are bits of me in all my characters.
In an economy where more and more value is in information - is in the bits, not the atoms, where bits can be copied essentially for free - any time you have that situation, economic schemes that rely on existing models of intellectual property laws for protection are going to do less and less well.
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
They looked great, you know the drawings of the guys playing looked great and bits of string around their necks. So it didn't seem to be that difficult a thing to do, or that inaccessible.
I've done some bits of shockingly bad TV that have never been shown, or at least I hope they've never been shown... Please don't dig them out!
I see bits and pieces of me in all the characters in my films.
When I went to record my first album, which should have been a punk album, there was a synthesiser in the control room. I'd never seen one before but they let me have a go on it and I loved it to bits.
I was mainly raised by a working mum who didn't have much time or inclination for making food. So I had three or four basic meals: fish fingers and a tomato; a packet scotch egg and a tomato; pasta with a tin of tomatoes; and extra mild plastic-y cheddar chopped into cubes with bits of cucumber.
When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role.