The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song. What do I write about? I never know.
I wasn't the typical pageant girl - I was a little more nerdy, and they gave me a voice. I created the Queen of the Universe pageant, which is charity-based, to benefit UNESCO. For me, the most important thing is that contestants have a charity-based platform or charity ambition.
I really reject that kind of comparison that says, Oh, he is the best. This is the second best. There is no such thing.
Mr. Wrigley believed in this: Put all your eggs in one basket and watch the basket. They don't do that today. This is the old-fashioned way I'm talking about. He carried it on to his business. Do one thing and stay with it.
The thing about theater that always and still kind of makes me edgy is that you work and work and work and work, and then you're just in performance mode, and then you have to just be on; the work is done, and then you just have to do it over and over again, so you're just constantly at that performance level.
Unrequited love is always a great thing.
My house is very traditional. And I love 'shabby chic.' It's a very homey-cosy vibe. We spend a lot of time in the kitchen, actually; maybe my kids will be doing their homework or that kind of thing when they get home from school. I love my kitchen.
Let's face it: if you and I have the same capabilities, the same energy, the same staff, if the only thing that's different between you and me is the products we can get, and I can get a better product than you, I'm going to be a better chef.
You only can live on adrenaline for so long; one thing is for sure, it doesn't pay the bills.
I really didn't even have time to get that many lessons, to be honest, because I was suddenly on the road. I was kind of thrown in the deep end. But that wasn't a bad thing when I look back at it.
I quite like the idea - just as an abstract idea - of 12 people's collective life experience and wisdom being this formidable thing. People say juries can be led - I think 12 people from different backgrounds, different races, different genders, different ages, it's hard to hoodwink.
A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
When I was coming up, it was the golden age. It was Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan, and Reese Witherspoon was starting. You really had, 'Who is America's Next Sweetheart?' every couple of years. And then this sort of bromance slacker thing took over.
I started singing very early. I was six or seven years old, and I was singing along to TV commercials and figuring out, 'Oh, hey, I can sing in tune. This is really cool.' But the songwriting thing came much much later, when I was 19 years old.
I mean, you've kind of got the track down, especially with ovals. The only thing that improves is that when race conditions come, you know what to expect slightly more from the track and from your car.
Bitcoin is coming from a bunch of young computer nerds who saw this thing and thought it was neat. A lot of the early bitcoiners are 19-year-old kids, still living at home with their parents, and they don't have any business experience.
The thing I do, really, is a communication with audiences more than any achievement through records.
You know, when I hear music, I just hear the whole thing.
On the small scale, 'Ico,' I think, actually delivered a small new thing: holding a character's hand and really feeling like your job is to rescue this person, and establishing a personal connection.
Change is the one thing we can be sure of.
About 25 years ago, I started out as a reporter covering politics. And that sort of just evolved into organized crime, because organized crime and politics were the same thing in Boston.
You cut their money back, for one thing... I go back a long way with the NEA.
The road, lyric-wise, is a trap, and a bore. Maybe it's interesting to me, but I don't think it's a connecting thing with other humans. What is there to write about? Truck stops, hotels, clubs?
The thing that makes a great genre movie is one that's not just entertainment, not just horror or sci-fi or whatever. The ones I love are the genre pictures with some subversive message underlying it all.
What a cruel thing war is... to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.
I'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever.
The one thing that matters is the effort.
Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
In terms of work, obviously acting is such a job that is very in the flesh kind of thing. It's your work, but it's your life, in a way. You can get so mixed up.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.
Some people are born with a brain that has this weird, magical mathematical thing that makes them an amazing jazz musician.
As soon as I got my proper first job, I never did acting again. I think the last thing I did was a Mike Figures film, and then I got a series with the BBC. I'm glad of the experience, because I think it's very, very good to understand what actors go through.
People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.
I don't really have a type. I don't want to be a cliche. But personality is a big thing for me. You can find cute guys all over. But he's got to have some sort of sense of humor, which is so hard to find in a guy. He's got to be a bit smart.
If you sell yourself short before you even start, you'll never know how far you could have gone. Ambition is a wonderful thing and has gotten me farther than I ever thought I'd go.
