At first, I only laughed at myself. Then I noticed that life itself is amusing. I've been in a generally good mood ever since.
It's important to slow down, every now and then, for no other reason than to call someone to say 'Hi.' It doesn't have to be a long conversation. Just calling out of the blue does more to let someone know you still care about them than nearly anything else.
When you choose the hard things, it takes longer than you think to get it done, and if you choose the hard thing and have a very particular way you want to do them and are uncompromising in that, then sometimes it takes even longer.
The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them.
You get a sense of how the show works and then let your personality take over.
I just think there's always room for humanity in acting, one can only hope, so when you bring in the whole life of a person that's playing a character, then surprises happen and are allowed to happen, and so it makes it more interesting.
When you write a high-tech thriller, and then people in the defense establishment start calling you - people I can't name - you feel you've hit a nerve.
If you don't have the confidence in baking, commit to making the recipe three times. The first two, do it exactly the way I've told you to make it. Twice. The first time you'll screw it up. The second time it will come out pretty good, and then the third time, make your adjustments.
It was quite a shot in the head to do the album and then have it shot down by nonmusical idiots.
I started in a research lab for TV cameras, then I worked at a tape duplication facility. That was the first introduction for me to recorded music and hi-fi.
I was about 11 when my mother brought me this karaoke machine and I was really into it back then, but about 4 or 5 years ago is when I started printing up my own music, going to the studio and doing my own thing.
My career is chequered. Then I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing.
What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter's pellucid first novel, 'The Apartment,' it may be simply the length of a day - but a day in which one travels surprisingly far, literally and figuratively.
I tell stories about people audiences might think they have nothing in common with, then they emotionally connect with them and find they're not different at all.
I got married and had a baby, so I was doing the mummy thing. I got hyperemesis and was only supposed to go away for maternity leave, but then it ended up being three or four years, and by that time, it was hard to get back into the music world, so when Drake called, it was the perfect opportunity.
When I was a kid I feel lonely, I have not many friends. If you make a movie, then you can work with different kinds of people and make different kinds of friend. That's very important to me.
When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don't belong in a psych ward, I don't think, but they become very real, like my own family, and then I have to say goodbye, close the door, and work on other things.
On bad days, I think I'd like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, 'Yeah, right, I'm going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.' No. No.
If the kids did want to get into showbiz then so be it, but I would never project anything on to my children.
I had been wanting to give guitar lessons to girls because I feel like women tend to use their voice as the starting point for a song and learn a few chords, and then it ends there because then they just use their voice to flesh out a song.
If you think, 'I'm jumping out of a plane at 30,000 feet!' you're not going to do it. But if you just jump out, then you'll have an interesting ride.
You sit at your computer for hours, then slave away at your job that you may or may not like. You don't know how to explain to them that the time when you feel alive or present is when you are writing.
Well, PT Anderson sent me a script of Boogie Nights which I let lay around my house for about three months, then one day I'm cleaning my office and decided that I'd better read this before the guy calls me back. I never put it down, bro.
All motion is cyclic. It circulates to the limits of its possibilities and then returns to its starting point.
But, then, Sampras won Wimbledon six times and that automatically puts him among the greatest.
Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.
I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice - anything just to get a paper bag. And I'd write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook.
My kid was a great baseball player. I thought I had it made. Front-row seats at Yankee Stadium. Then he turned sixteen and wanted to be a rapper.
The incentive for digging up gossip has become so great that people will break the law for the opportunity to take that picture. Then it crosses the line into invasion of privacy. The thing that's really bad about it, though, is that the tabloids don't tell the truth.
You need to make a commitment, and once you make it, then life will give you some answers.
I started writing prose before I started writing television. Then 'Breaking Bad' came around, and to me, writing 'Breaking Bad' is like writing a novel each season. So it's been very creatively satisfying writing for the show.
The way I grew up playing, and the way most Americans have grown up, is that you hit the ball up in the air and then it stops where it lands.
I'm predicting that we'll finally have a computer will search my e-mail automatically and delete every message that begins with 'thought you'd be interested,' and then give an electrical shock to the sender to remind him or her to stop send that kind of message.
It's the same with visual arts, you have some really cool, wonderful striking images that make you think and then again you have wonderful striking images that just take you away from the existing world for a second. And I like the latter a bit more.
One of the things that I've always thought I would like to do is to develop an environmental index. Then people can measure their own environmental performance on an index as they do in other ways.
When I was working for Miramax, before Sundance, a videotape of 'The Blair Witch Project' - of the full, completed movie - went to a lot of the buyers. And so we all saw it before the festival, and I passed, a bunch of people passed... Then I watched the movie marching toward success, and was reminded by my bosses what a dope I was.
