You run the risk, whenever you build your story around a central mystery, of either letting it go too long, or revealing it too soon and then taking the wind out of the sails of the narrative.
Google did a great job hacking the Web to create search - and then monetizing search with advertising. And Apple did a great job humanizing hardware and software so that formerly daunting computers and applications could become consumer-friendly devices - even a lifestyle brand.
With acting, you do want to get every job, and you're trying to get every audition, but then you reach a certain stage where you start to kind of gravitate toward the stories and the people that have a similar heartbeat.
I used to comfort myself with the idea of a book with serrated, detachable pages, so that you could read the thing the way it came and then shuffle the pages, like a giant deck of cards, and read the book in an entirely different order. It would be a different book, wouldn't it? It would be one of infinite books.
When you don't talk down to your audience, then they can grow with you.
I believe that 'advocacy journalism' is not an oxymoron. If that means that I'm going to disrupt the cable, partisan fracas of obsession over what this means from left and right, then so be it. I will be disruptive of it.
One of our biggest pet peeves is listening to bands that use harmony guitars for the sake of it. If you can't figure out how do something different than Maiden, UFO, or even Boston, then what's the point?
With Martha Stewart, the power of the brand, the power of television, taught me that if you can marry all those ingredients - like you marry a great song with a great artist - and get the right television exposure, then you've got something that really is going to be sustainable. You can expand and blow up.
Whenever we have an opportunity to engage with each other as human beings and to minimize the differences between us based on disparity in resources, then we should do it.
The key is falling in love with something, anything. If your heart's attached to it, then your mind will be attached to it.
In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.
Do you know who I would love to play? Morticia Addams - then I could use all that darkness to be funny.
I'd love to become like Bill Murray, who was so funny on 'Saturday Night Live' and has gone on to do some of the landmark comedies people like. And then to add this whole other phase to his career with 'Lost in Translation' and 'Rushmore.' I always felt to be able to have something similar to that would be great.
If you are an investor who's retired and hopes to live off the income that your portfolio is generating, then we would focus just on the dividend yield.
My love for Arsenal dates back to when I went to watch them play with the then-largest shareholder David Dein. I developed a likeness for the team, and I have been a supporter of the team since then.
Let me put it this way: If you're sitting in a movie and you're watching me, and you say, 'Isn't that Michael Caine a wonderful actor?' then I've failed.
I called up and said, 'Dad, I won a MacArthur.' My father goes: 'I always thought your sister would win that,' and I said, 'Dad, just say congratulations and keep your private thoughts private.' At that point he laughed, then burst into tears, and it was obvious that he was so happy and proud.
I'm not practising, I don't go to church, but what I got from it was a sense of belonging to something bigger. What I really miss is being forced to be in a community with people that aren't the same as you. Then, you really have to work through the ways that you're different.
There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.
I think we manifest the very thing we put out. If you're putting out negativity, then you're going to retrieve that same sentiment. If you emanate joy, it comes back to you.
My whole family is obsessed by brandy butter. And bread sauce. Then, of course, there will be a lot of wind in the afternoon! We have never disguised the wind side of our lives as a family; we think it's hilarious.
For me, it's not necessarily interesting to play a strong, fearless woman. It's interesting to play a woman who is terrified and then overcomes that fear. It's about the journey. Courage is not the absence of fear, it's overcoming it.
I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.
You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.
My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway.
If you had told me ten years ago that I would be able to go and make out with Will Forte one day and then Woody Harrelson the next, it would have blown my mind.
I think I have a pattern of nice and lovely and then dark and twisted.
I happen to be interested in watching a face age. I like faces of women aging so it makes me personally quite sad. That's a beautiful gift from God. If people don't want to see that anymore then I won't be in anymore movies.
It's great to do small plays in the theatre and then go off with Blur and play in front of thousands of people.
I don't think about an industry or building things, but somebody says you're lucky if you find something you like to do, which is true, and then it's a miracle if you get paid to do it.
If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself.
Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.
An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree.
I like to do on screen what I'm not in life. In life, I'm much more weak and insecure, and so then you know I like to play characters that are stronger than me.
I changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting.
Sometimes you revisit things and relationships, and then you get going on in it, and you realized that there is a reason this ended.
