When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God.
I feel like, in some ways, I'm just a journalist.
The American obsession with 'Downton' amuses me slightly because it's such a fiction. I've always been questioned about my historical veracity, and 'Downton' just flies past, when it's completely made up.
I just want to be happy. You know what I'm saying? I just want to be happy, and I want to be able to make somebody else happy.
The best dating advice I can give is... are you going in it for marriage, or are you going in it for just a date? You've got to be open about it right away, because the other person could be in it for marriage, but you're not.
It's what the Pixies always said about music - they were writing songs and just trying not to be boring. That was their main motivation and it worked for them. I remember reading that and thinking that was the way to do it.
I do interviews and signings and readings and all of these people just hang off my every word. And then I go home and have dinner with my family and nobody lets me get a word in.
Elaine is just in pain. I think Elaine has become very, very sad woman. She is someone who is in deep need of many hours of analysis and I like to think that I'm not that type of person.
As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him. The same is true for Moammar Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state.
I'm really looking forward to it, if you can imagine floating weightless, watching the world pour by through the big bay window of the space station playing a guitar; just a tremendous place to think about where we are in history.
I think that's the type of game I'm better at - faster paced, just moving the ball more around.
With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.
I was black growing up in an all-white neighborhood, so I felt like I just didn't fit in. Like I wasn't as good as everybody else, or as smart, or whatever.
The distance between number one and number two is always a constant. If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you. That is a big lesson. I cannot just expect the organization to improve if I don't improve myself and lift the organization, because that distance is a constant.
You have to make difficult choices in your life, and you just have to be happy with them.
Well, he's just the same guy who in other aspects of his life would be very late to a trend.
The big things that I've learnt from my dad is that you can just say what you want to say.
If I'm an entrepreneur and I have an idea, and I don't have the development talent around me but I need to find a developer, I would do my selection just like I would with hiring an employee.
Here we are, we're alone in the universe, there's no God, it just seems that it all began by something as simple as sunlight striking on a piece of rock. And here we are. We've only got ourselves. Somehow, we've just got to make a go of it. We've only ourselves.
For minority actors, developing our own projects has to be the eventual path. We have a lot of stories to tell and a really unique voice. But none of that is going to be heard as long as we're just the hired hands, acting.
I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.
I used to enjoy the spotlight. If I had a day off from filming, I didn't know what to do. Now I enjoy my family time so much, there is this sense of, if it all went away, and I was just a mom, I would love my life.
I just want to fit in and win games for my team.
I've been online doing all kinds of research and that seems to be the constant criticism, that Aibileen's accent was just too thick. And for me, I don't want anything to distract from the character.
I actually work at my craft, and I actually want to be the best in my category, and I want to be a true actress. And a lot of people just want fame, and there's a huge difference.
I just play, and I'm always trying to write songs.
It was really amazing. I mean, he'd never mentioned that he played in the symphony, like serious violin playing, not fiddle playing. And he just blew us away.
Everybody wants attention, more or less. I just want a lot.
I learned to absolutely love the feeling of winning a tough match on a tough point or figuring out how to come back when I was down and win ugly. Walking off the court with a W just made me so happy.
I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.
Don't forget to celebrate. When I was first coming up, everything was so serious - we were always rushing to get to the next thing - that we didn't take the time to say, 'Man, look what we did just now.'
I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way.
Anybody who really knows about the TV business knows that it would be impossible to just march in one day and say to your colleagues and bosses, 'Oh yes, I'm hosting my own show.'
I realize now I didn't really want to die. I just wanted to stop the hurt and pain.
I think sometimes people project things on you, but I'm trying to handle everything that's happened to me with a certain amount of grace, dignity and good manners. You just can't necessarily win all the time.
Typically in horror films the character just services the plot, and you really are just going from 'point a' to 'point b,' just so that you can end up at 'point c.' They are just sort of stick characters. That's just not interesting to me.
