People always come up to me and say, 'you should do standup.' It's nice to discover things about yourself. That keeps everything lively and fun.
One of the things that all religions have is a narrative of doomsday. There has to be some kind of overarching fear of the future. If there wasn't, none of the religions could invoke this important thing - that science has no evidence of, by the way - called free will.
I have a philosophy that white people would be interested in Native Americans because, first of all, it's probably the only group as a country we all study and know the history and then never study again past the age of 10. So I think we have these things we believe are true, that are just not true about what an audience wants.
Our ever-present mobile devices provide the immediate and convenient information necessary to make sharing things truly irresistible.
I don't think that there's much that sets me apart from other musicians, but I think there are definitely things that set me apart from other kinds of artists. I feel that musicians do it their own way, write their own songs and put on a great live shows.
You know, I've always tried to look at things as just what the part was. I never tried to worry about whether it was the lead or not the lead, because I think you can really mess your mind up when you're too caught up in those things.
Nothing is a calling card. Everything is what you do. If you do it in order to get somewhere else, you're not actually doing it. If you're thinking, 'What is the weird thing I want to make with my friends?' money and other things will come later.
Great people want to work on things that matter. Inevitably, a great person working on imaginary work will turn into an unsatisfied person.
I've been devoting quite a bit of my time to harmonic studies on my own, in libraries and places like that. I've found you've got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.
I definitely had to do some soul searching, and there would be a lot of times where I would sit back and look at the Internet and say to myself, 'This is a way of being able to communicate with all my fans all over the world, other than just being in New York and only hearing the New York side of things.'
On the movie side of things, the difficulties come with so few movies being made, and when they are, it seems that it's a marketing game. Story sometimes takes a backseat to that one grand marketing idea.
I like to jot down ideas on the back of envelopes and to recognise the potential value in small things. I also like the freedom to think without feeling compelled to write too early. Stories are often better if we can hold back and get to know the characters and the sounds of language.
As you get older, you kind of take on things and become kind of different than what you used to be as a kid, obviously.
When I decided to write 'The God of Small Things', I had been working in cinema. It was almost a decision to downshift from there. I thought that 300 people would read it. But it created a platform of trust.
Protest actions and propaganda are two slightly different things.
It's been one of the most painful things I've ever been through in my whole life: trying to understand the degree to which behaviors that I thought were totally appropriate were destructive.
I go into Daunt Books in Marylebone every couple of weeks. My wife Sara demolishes books, but I only buy stuff occasionally. I like boys' things, spies and the Cold War.
Every job I've had since 'Smallville' has wanted me to have red hair, so I have to thank 'Smallville' for that. But, just the fact that it was so different was appealing to me. As an actor, you want to be able to play a lot of different things.
There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.
I would say I'm more traditional than I am superstitious. I don't, for example, have to do things ritually before the game in order to feel comfortable going to the game. But I don't think I'm naturally a football player. I don't have that grit and that killer instinct.
What it turns out is that we think we're multitasking, but we're not. The brain is sequential tasking: we flit from one thought to the next very, very rapidly, giving us the illusion that what we're doing is doing all these things at once.
I fell in love with stories watching a British television puppet show called 'Thunderbirds' when it first came out on TV, about 1965, so I would have been 4 or 5 years old. I went out into the garden at my mom and dad's house, and I used to play with my little dinky toys, little cars and trucks and things.
I started writing because I wasn't getting things as an actor.
Practice being curious; want to know things; ask questions.
I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.
As a man grows and increases in the things of this world, if he is not careful, he will lose the Spirit of the Lord, and he will set his heart upon the things of this world.
When a movie is called 'searingly honest,' it's almost invariably grim and demonstrates how bad things can get.
My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.
I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, 'Hey, this is not appropriate.'
Looking back... it's hard to understand what all the fuss was about as things changed in just a few years. When you look at all the things that have happened in the world, it seems very small.
I'm an adventurer and I enjoy all types of things, and eating is a part of that. It's just too bad we have to watch what we eat.
'Milk and Honey' was written with me being honest to myself, kind of pulling at the things that I hear the most and saying that out loud, and you know, that thing that we hear the most is most universal, and so that rings true with all folks. The language used in the poetry is extremely, extremely accessible.
Usually, I walk around and think about things. When I come across a thought that makes me laugh, I write it down.
Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.
The first few years in L.A. were really tough and scary, but I had to figure things out for myself.
It ends all things: birds, trees, flowers, mountain tops, and business; it grinds stones to sand, and as terrible as it is, and it's the most beautiful thing we have in our lives - time.
