I enjoy stand up so much because I take time off, and then I'll be excited to go back to it.
Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
You play a couple of shows, and these label guys come - and they leave halfway through a show. Then the phone calls just stop. And your heart is broken.
I think that the day a justice forgets that each decision comes at a cost to someone, then I think you start losing your humanity.
Examine the history of China for 2,000 years back, and then compare it with the Western history of fifty years! Does the government of these foreign countries present such a record of generosity, benevolence, loyalty, and honesty as ours?
I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going. I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment. I'm here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I'm at, then I go forward to the next place.
I would be lying if I said I'm not flattered being voted as the 'Time's' Most Desirable Man of 2012. Frankly, I have no idea how the desirability quotient is arrived at. If it is just drop dead good looks, then I have to thank God and my parents for it.
If you're a person who complains about everything all the time, then you're just the boy who cried 'wolf.' But if you do it on occasion and about the right reasons, then people listen.
I think the first thing I did when I was a kid was a Maxwell House Coffee commercial with George Strait. And I did a Wrangler Jeans commercial, and then 'The Patriot' came to town.
Doing a me-too business, because it's you - the only person who cares about that is you. The market doesn't care if it's you. The market is pretty much being served. You better have something that the world doesn't have, because even then, you might screw it up through your own ineptitude and inexperience.
It was always inevitable that if you get serious trouble in any family then everybody's inclined to look at the head of that family and see if they see any cause or reason to associate it with the head of the, head of the family, why it should be.
In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
The thing is, I grew up in L.A., so I had this unique opportunity to live in both communist Russia and see that life, and then move to America as a young girl and experience a completely different life.
If you can read, then you can recite Shakespeare. But that's not acting.
I was lucky because I got so successful so early, and when you get successful early, then you can afford to be a little bit humble.
It's a bit weird; everybody is trying to be different, but then they're exactly the same as whatever mob they hang out with.
I've played different nationalities, and everything from vulnerable to strong to crooked to demented. It just increases your possibilities of work because, if people know you can do just about anything, then you're going to get more offers. That's what I want to do.
It's a sense of pride, a sense of you set out to get a record deal, and we got that. We set out to get a No. 1 record, and then we got that. Then you say, 'Wow, that was impossible and now even more impossible is to stay No. 1 and stay current and put out new records that people care about,' and we really stuck to that.
If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story.
I do believe that we have the opportunity to continue - I repeat myself over and over again with this - to redefine and reinvent ourselves and as long as we do that, then I think we've got some pretty good odds in our favor, because we're not always presenting the same thing.
You wonder, 'How could it possibly be me?' Well, of course it could happen to you. You have it. Then, of course, you wake up every morning, and you hope it's a bad dream. Then you wake up. I have cancer.
In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.
Once respect comes, then loves come, and when love comes, a really healthy relationship comes, you know? If you don't have that, things just crumble.
Sometimes I think I might have children while I'm still working, but then I think I'd better wait until I can give them all I want to give.
If you think about 'The Pill' by Loretta, that was totally blacklisted back then. But she revolutionized and liberated a generation of women - country listeners and beyond - that were sort of in that box and were able to break out of it.
What I think about derivatives is if every institution that owns or trades them is properly margined and marked to market, including end-users, including every institution, including sovereigns and multilateral institutions, then the system would be safe - if people were margined the way customers of investment banks are margined.
You should never ask, 'What would the readers like now?' Instead, you should ask, 'What would I like if I was a reader?' And then you must trust your own mind.
When I was a baby, my mom used to have a dance school, and she used to teach classes there. We didn't have money for a babysitter, so she always brought me with her to the dancing school. Back then, I was already watching and listening to Michael Jackson for a long time.
If I'm creating something for myself, then I want to have fun.
You meet people and go, 'We're going to be friends forever!' then you get home and can't even remember their name.
Actors create a fantastic lifestyle thinking they're going to be able to maintain it. Then they can't get work or have to start taking work that doesn't suit them.
To become an astronaut, someone has to have a dream of his own to do something that he or she has always wanted to do, then commit himself to making that dream come true.
The city's the best gallery I could imagine. I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. I would control it directly with the public in the streets.
When I heard 'Moon River', at first I thought it was just a nice song, but then I started paying attention to the words and realized this song was about Huck Finn. I just love the words, that it's kind of you and me against the world, and we're going to make it together.
If you're looking to be loved for a part, it's great and enticing to be adorable in a romantic comedy. But then, as an actor, you get stuck.
My father passed away when I was 12, so it was very difficult. But I was always the class clown. I don't know why - maybe as an escape. But then I was sent away to military prep school.