People are people the world over. Some are good, some bad, some greedy and some generous. Nations are like people and act the same way.
Playing and singing at the same time is pretty cool, but sometimes it's difficult to know when you can just really let go a bit because you've got to get back to bloody microphone and sing some stuff.
You can get stuff done in New York that you can't in Los Angeles. If you wanted to get some milk and get your shoes repaired and drop something off at the dry cleaner, that's an all-day adventure in Los Angeles. In New York, you can bang that out in half an hour.
I didn't want to play the wife of some guy my dad's age.
Digression is my passion. I'm not kidding. I love telling the main stories, but in some ways, what I love most is using those narratives as a way of stringing together the interesting stories that people have kind of forgotten and that are kind of surprising.
Well actually, some weeks they'll write that I'm jealous of living in her shadow. Then other weeks, they'll write that all I want to do is loaf around on her money! It's ridiculous!
The American people are extraordinarily comfortable, affluent, and secure. It's easy for us to make the argument that God's purpose is being fulfilled through history and through the rise of American power. And to some degree, it probably is.
Some people, however long their experience or strong their intellect, are temperamentally incapable of reaching firm decisions.
I want to stand for something, and it's probably going to be something that some people stand against.
If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.
There are just some really beautiful people in the world. When you're walking down the street, or you're at a restaurant, someone catches your eye because they have their own look. It goes way beyond what they're wearing - into their mannerisms, the way they smile, or just the way they hold themselves.
Some bloke came up to me in Tesco a couple of years ago at 11:30 pm and said: 'Excuse me, would you mind telling my son here that you're Uncle Vernon?' I said: 'Get a grip. It's 11:30 at night - what's he doing out of bed? I'm not here to entertain people at this time of night.
Some songs are just like tattoos for your brain... you hear them and they're affixed to you.
All my movies are about people with some ideology, but guess what? It never works out.
Some venues are better run than others. Sometimes it's just maddening to deal with full dinners being served in front of your face. You can have a good or bad show anywhere.
I always say, 'Man, the Creator is preparing me for something. He's keeping the sun on me for some reason. He's keeping me aligned with that generation.' Because I genuinely love people, I love hip-hop, and I love using it as a tool to communicate and to create a better vibration.
Our solution on 'The Simpsons' is to do jokes that people who have an education, or some frame of reference, can get. And for the ones who don't, it doesn't matter, because we have Homer banging his head and saying, 'D'oh!'
I have been passed over on some things because people didn't think I was edgy enough. But the people who took those gigs are gone now, and I am still here.
I hopefully try to find people and projects that my gut instinctively points me towards, and hope that there's some type of rhyme to them later.
It's not easy to part with the trophies. However, I do need to have some long-term financial security for those close to me.
It's wild, how many places of conflict that have fashion weeks. It's becoming some sort of marker for these countries that says, 'We are in conversation with the rest of the world.'
So, I think China desperately needs to legitimize some form of opposition.
The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.
The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.
I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.
It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.
I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.
Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.
When I felt I was rejected by my first wife, and she said, 'Some day you will thank me for this,' you know what? I do. And so, sometimes it is darkest before the dawn. You can think it is bleak and you can't see. You never know.
I think there are some very evil things about gentrification.
The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!
Well, we've made some changes on this tour. We're no longer sleeping in the parking lots and swimming in the fountains. We've been staying in hotels most of the way, though I will say some hotels have declined to take us because we're just having too much fun.
I've always had a complicated relationship with sleep. Even as a little kid, I never wanted to go to bed - it always seemed unfair in some way.
For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.
We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.
The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.
