Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you've got to be wise enough to know when to leave.
But at the same time, I don't let myself regret things to the point that I'm paralyzed.
I've done a lot of things in a business where you're lucky to stay alive, so when the time comes, I'll be happy to pass my knowledge along and help someone else.
To this day I get mail from women who say, I went to law school because of your song. But I would hate to think out of the wide spectrum of things I have done in my career, that's all I would be remembered for.
At MTV, although the audience is smaller, I found it more interesting to deliver news to a specific group of people, because my story then did not have to try to be all things to all people.
Over the years, I've heard a lot of people who don't feel that they have it in them to do anything creative. They shrug and claim that they 'have no talent.' They say things like, 'Don't quit your day job' or 'Leave it to the professionals.' In the steampunk subculture, I don't hear those things.
When I turned 50, something clicked in my head and I said, 'I'm not going to live to 100. I'm half-cooked already.' I set the family down and I said, 'Listen everybody, we're now entering the decade of Daddy. We're going to start doing things that I want to do.'
I believe many people feel like God is mad at them. One day I put a post on Facebook that said, 'God is not mad at you.' Within a few hours, we literally had thousands of positive responses from people saying things like, 'That is exactly what I needed to hear today.' Obviously, this is a message we need to hear.
I was a sailor. I was torpedoed, spent two weeks in a lifeboat. I was on the Murmansk run; I worked a 20 mm. machine gun, helped bring down a Stuka, all that kind of stuff. I've got letters from Franklin Roosevelt for things I did then. But those kind of credentials didn't work for you in the Cold War.
I think when things linger, that's when they become a distraction. I don't want any distractions.
Some of the things written about me hurt, but there is nothing I can do about it.
To underestimate one's thirst, to pass a given landmark to the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running water - there is no help for any of these things.
Film is just a different version of what we did round the campfire when we were Neanderthals. We tell stories so people can learn things and relativise things.
However, without considering this connection, there is no doubt but that more good than evil, more delight than sorrow, arises from compassion itself; there being so many things which balance the sorrow of it.
I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.
Parents and kids know they should pass up the fries for an apple and exchange the video game for a game of tag - but knowing and doing are certainly different things.
I try to be a good representative for country music. But as a country artist, it's important to move the needle and make a difference beyond your core audience. But you can't ever strategically try to accomplish that; then things get weird.
If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them.
I'm not into things that feel like a sequel. There's just something magical about when something happens for the first time.
I don't think you can sing about certain things when you're a teen-ager or in your early 20s, because you haven't lived long enough. So I think living gives you character and that comes out in your voice.
I think the family is the place where the most ridiculous and least respectable things in the world go on.
Dealing with political things, it's not for me. It makes me crazy. I want to buy, you want to sell. Please make it simple.
In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.
Well, I'll say I have an incredible ability to fantasize - I really do. I don't have to have things tangible to be able to see them, and therefore I enjoy so many things, because they're in my mind.
You’d better not know so much, than to know so many things that ain’t so.
But obviously as television began, it so undercut movies that he was trying to think of a way to combine seeing these special things, and the fact that people were just captivated by the magic box.
Going into 'Details' magazine to pitch concepts for a potential photo shoot was one of the most nerve-wracking things I had ever done. I didn't really know what one did in a pitch, how they were structured, etc., and that freaked me out big time.
I had business experience. I had made my living designing and building electronic equipment. Basic business was not new to me, but the music business was completely new to me. I knew nothing about distribution, or any of those things.
Meeting people at my fertility doctor's office who are going through the same things I'm going through, I thought, 'Why not share my story?' It's been really emotional.
You don't just luck into things as much as you would like to think you do. You build step by step, whether it is friendships or opportunities.
Hollywood exists only for the B-movies. The best things are coming from Europe.
Now while the German money is over for Hollywood, I still have $80 million to make movies, and we will have two things coming up: less major movies and the price for actors will go down.
Everything's not going to go perfect. You're going to have some losses that you're going to have to bounce back from and some things that are a little unforeseen that you're going to have to deal with.
I don't like reading things that people say on the Internet because I know so much of it is not true. I don't want to waste my time worrying about what other people are thinking. I just want to focus on being able to do cool projects.
In terms of all kinds of things, in terms of educational reform, in terms of health care, transportation, Colorado has a chance to be a national model.
You must, as an entrepreneur - if that's your position - be doing things that really move the needle.
