I don't think people by nature are extremists. You will never find a population of extremists. Extremists have existed throughout the centuries on all religions. And what happens is, extremists start to have more leverage when the situation is bad.
If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals.
I don't profess to be a political rapper, like groups such as 'Dead Prez' or 'Public Enemy', but I think social commentary should make its way into your music. Speaking on your neighbourhood is social commentary - what happens, what's going on.
We are members of one another. What binds us together is far greater than what separates us... because of our interconnectivity, what happens to the least of us happens to all of us. Whatever you do for the least of us, you do for all of us.
We use fashion for status and to beautify and there's nothing wrong with that, but when it becomes completely unbalanced, then you're living a decadent life. And when that happens on a global scale, you're living in a decadent world.
Nothing changes and very little happens in Paris. This is a great place to work without distraction - and then I run away to New York, where I have a life!
What happens is, illegal immigrants can run across the border, drop a baby, and say, 'Ha-ha, there's nothing you can do now. My kid's an American citizen.' Well, that wasn't the intent of the 14th Amendment. Americans would not agree with that. It creates a horrible incentive.
You have to create characters - certainly in series TV - who people engage with. They don't have to be nice; you don't have to agree with them. But they do have to be compulsively watchable and believable and human, and you want to know what happens to them.
I'm trying to learn to really use space. My philosophy is that every time you interrupt space in a very confident, secure manner, then music happens.
The reason that most British actors are better than most American actors in the end is that they don't make any money. At the very end of their lives, they get into a space movie and they make a lot of money, but until that happens, basically, they don't have bank accounts. They live from day to day.
I think that's what happens when you get scared, and you're rushing, and you don't have time. Rather than cut things out and take a chance, and build things up you think are working, you cut everything down a little bit, and everything sort of suffers.
Probably careful plotting reflects my personality. I am meticulous by nature. I can't imagine speed-writing anything that happens to pop into my head.
For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.
Traditional fiction has a little bit of spatial exploration but is basically a question of time - the question is, what happens next?
It's very hard to live in an environment where you're reminded, constantly told that your existence just happens to be here... That you are not meant to be here.
Analog, electronic, whatever it happens to be, I simply love and adore literally every aspect of making music.
No matter what happens, one should not stop dreaming... dreams do come true.
I think a lot of scapegoating has been done on NAFTA. The reality is, a lot of the jobs have been lost mostly to technology. And that is something that happens well beyond the reach of NAFTA or any other trade agreement.
For me, the writing process is the same as the reading process. I want to know what happens next.
Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process - maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like 'Lights Please' happens like that.
What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.
What people think of me doesn't affect me. As bizarre as it sounds, I don't have a Google alert on my phone; I don't read newspapers, and I don't watch television. If something important happens, I will get to know about it.
If it happens, I'll be proud, and it would be a dream come true, though I doubt I ever thought I'd be a Hall of Famer when I started. It wasn't until late in my career that people started to mention it, and you start thinking about it a little bit.
When I'm playing 'Rock Band,' I'm like, 'Man, someday, later on in life when I'm a famous rock star...' Which gets a little harder to convince myself of as I reach middle age, but it still happens a lot.
I've never really been a careerist; I've never been able to step back and look at anything in that way. I though this is just what happens. I did take my work very seriously. I loved immersing myself in a character. I loved getting the opportunity to do that. I didn't realize how extraordinary it was, how lucky I was, because I was young.
I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
I think what happens is, people do just want to see you as a glamour doll that's put up on screen, but I guess it's how you see yourself.
When anything bad happens, my insecurities come flooding out.
I wrote a song called 'Here on Earth,' and the hook is, 'There's no answers here on earth.' Basically, searching for the 'why' when someone passes away, and I feel really fortunate that my dad lived as long as he did. But no matter what happens or how it happens, it's certainly a stinker.
Ten out of ten people die. You start thinking about that and it really makes you start to ask the big questions: Where did I come from? Where am I going when I die? What happens when we step out of here? What's out there?
The really interesting moment will be when you have a critical mass of people engaging through the networks, more than through the press and TV. When that happens, the culture of politics has to change, moving away from controlled one-way messages towards a political culture that is more questioning.
Nothing to me is unexpected. No disappointment is unexpected - whether it's movies or people or relationships. I'm always ready for the punch directly between the eyes. So I get hurt, but I never get hurt. Happens all the time.
No man wants to settle down. It happens. Eventually you're going to bump into somebody that makes you go, 'Hmm, I don't mind seeing this person every day.'
At some point, I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it; that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.
Real change happens when you feel genuinely inspired, turned on by possibility and unwilling to settle for anything less.
I definitely enjoy the kind of magic that happens being on stage with a group when everything's working. The vibe when that's happening gets even better if the audience is involved and you can feel that interaction. That's something you don't get with your headphones on in a studio; it's much different.
