Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing.
Growing up in Ireland, when my family received important news, good or bad, we would boil water and make tea. It was the first thing I did when my father died in 1984. This ritual allowed me a moment to take in the enormity of what had happened.
I love action and I love doing my own stunts. I love that sort of thing.
The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.
When I did 'Parent Trap,' I was ten. I was thrown off by the whole fame thing.
There's a molecule inside of you that is connected to everything - every person, every energy, every thing. You look for it, and when you find it, then you allow it to magnify and grow and be the dominating chemistry inside of you.
I was the youngest child and got a lot more freedom than my brother and sister. I used to wander, doing my own thing under the radar, but I didn't get in bad, bad trouble.
The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
Thank God there is a such thing as hiatus. We got the first 'Dr. Horrible' done in six days, we banged it out.
I'm social and I meet people and talk to people but I'm not looking for the ideal person to fit my mold and to raise my family with yet. I'm just kind of doing my thing and learning from the people I'm around and who I cross paths with.
A helpful thing for me has always been - this is from a great acting teacher Declan Donnellan - is this beautiful way of expressing how and why people do things that other people may not do. It's a simple sentence that says, 'I understand you; you don't understand me.'
The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine. Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started.
In America today, unfortunately, the right wing has been totally commandeered by the Tea Party, and it's a bad thing for our party.
Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.
It's healthy to have older friends. You go, 'Look, I'm younger than them!' That's always the nice thing, if you can be the youngest one in the room at times. Like if you're always the oldest one in the room, you'll start to feel like the oldest person in the world. So get older friends, because they're cool. Get cool older friends.
The thing I was attracted to as a little girl was Kirk, Bones and Spock, and their utter loyalty. There's nothing more powerful than that.
There's no such thing as a cautious creative.
I think essentially the meaning of life is probably the journey and not really any one thing or an outcome or a result. I think it's kinda the process and I think that if you can find happiness in the process then maybe that's it.
Even when I was a kid, I had a good thing with kids. To this day, if I go to a birthday party with one of my kids, I swear to you, I am so much happier hanging out with my kids and their friends than talking to the grown-ups.
I've always written a little bit. I mean, I've written screenplays, and I've doctored my dialogue for years, and I've written speeches - I was a speechwriter on 'The West Wing,' so I like that kind of thing. But I never really thought I'd write a book.
For Bobby and I to sing R&B and sound black was probably the stupidest thing we could do. White radio stations wouldn't play us because they thought we were black. Black stations wouldn't play us because they thought we were white. Any time you break ground, you go against the grain.
I love the powerful woman who's complicated. There's no push to be one thing or another thing. It's all human. That's what you look for as an actor: characters written and portrayed in the most human way possible.
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
I just have this thing in my head that I want to do serious stories that are still just way too cute and drawn in a really cute, appealing, rounded, childish way, and it's like, I don't know if it makes sense - but it's just something I'm really strongly compelled to do.
Discretion is the most important thing for a banker. That is the philosophy of the family... I mean, of the bank.
The Republicans here in Concord and down in Washington D.C. would have us believe that the War on Women is a phony war. Michele Bachmann and Fox News would have us believe that the whole thing is 'political fiction.'
I don't think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it's as simple as that. It's just like if you're watching something moving, and you feel yourself welling up. It's the same thing. You're just being carried along with the story. There's nothing magical about it. I think I'm in touch with my emotions, and I can't help it.
Inevitably, considerations of God in what otherwise intend to be mass entertainments come down to the same thing they come down to in any context, which is a consideration of humanity.
Becoming that guy who does one thing is not very interesting. I'm lucky and proud to have been involved in period films and action films.
I became hugely overweight and then hated myself because it was a form of self-abuse, something over which I had no control. I think the thing compulsive over-eaters want to achieve is that stuffed-full Christmas afternoon feeling.
Working with the brothers can put pressure on my voice, so I choose to do my own solo thing so I can save my voice. I couldn't do both now. The Neville Brothers is a funk band; they play loud, and I have a strong voice.
I was one of the first American rock n' rollers in the '50s to go to many foreign countries. It's a wonderful thing to go out and spread joy and love rather than hate.
One thing is undeniable. If we are going to continue to have support for migration, we need to be able to control the numbers.
They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that became kind of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers around the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf.
A lot of the TV shows, they do long hours, and they do a lot of days, and you don't get a lot of time. But the good thing is, if you get one that's made in L.A., or made in a place you want to be, you get to go home every night.
I eventually want to do writing on all the films, but not necessarily to be the writer. Writing is a painful, painful thing; it really is.
