I think probably with any performer, but maybe with rock music especially, the audience wants to see the singer being real, and exploring, and not doing a rehearsed routine, so I'm just constantly looking for new things to try. I'm really curious out there, and my curiosity has led me into all kinds of bizarre situations.
My live performance, it just comes from feeling an energy and emotion from the crowd.
The show 'Mahabharat' has given me sleepless night; I just couldn't stop thinking about it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me, and I don't want to leave it at any cost.
Blind Willie Johnson is a pretty big vocal influence. He can be very harsh, like gargly, gruff vocals, but also just slip into some very delicate, vulnerable soft stuff. I like that combination.
For lack of any clearer idea, I just started acting one day. It had been in the back of my head for a while, but I think in some ways I was afraid to do it, and finally I just stepped up.
It's as certain that as long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, we will just keep burning them.
I love doing girly stuff with my mum or with Sophia. I took Sophia and a couple of her friends to the Hello Kitty spa. They had chocolate facials and Hello Kitty mani-pedis. I put it on my Twitter and got lots of abuse for it, but I think it's just a nice girly thing.
When I first moved to New York, I had some colleagues who said I should be my straightest self - whatever that means - when I went into casting offices, but I didn't want to put on an act of what I thought was heterosexual. I just wanted to be myself, and I'm very grateful because I feel like I've been embraced for that.
There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'
I'm not the type that's going to sit and preach to people if they don't need it just because I've been around the block a few times.
Well, I jumped for the first time when I was 16. I just loved it and immediately realized that it was what I wanted to do.
I am not a methodical singer. I don't follow any process or rules; what I follow is just my heart - whatever I experience, I just write and then compose it.
If you want to relax, watch the clouds pass by if you're laying on the grass, or sit in front of the creek; just doing nothing and having those still moments is what really rejuvenates the body.
I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.
If I let a blue mood run rampant, before I know it I'm obsessing about the color of the satin lining in my coffin - will it match my dress? That's when I feel like Alice in Cancerland falling down the rabbit hole and just have to stop.
I guess I'm probably a Method actor; I don't know... I just think of it as staying in the zone.
I guess I sort of just feel like I am lucky.
Fatherhood didn't just happen to me. I am deliberately living it, re-imagining it, and rediscovering it every day. It is as beautiful as I make it, just like anything else in life.
Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced.
There are wonderful things happening all around the world. From Nova Scotia to Kerala, Bristol to Melbourne, and even in the Philippines, zero waste is on the agenda. I think what's particularly inspiring is when communities don't wait to be told what to do but just go ahead and do it.
I've got to say my mother is the most important woman in my life, and not just because she is a 'Scotsman' reader.
Great American leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. worshipped God just as our Founding Fathers did. We must never forget this important aspect of our heritage or use it as a political bargaining chip.
My greatest fear is speaking in public. You meet, like, um, people who just concentrate on me. I'd rather not have everyone focus on me.
What's really cool about our family is that we don't hold grudges, and I think that is what's been the key to the success. We get into our little disagreements, and whether we're right or wrong, we'll go and apologize. That's just the way we are.
I have a very specific memory of watching 'Singing in the Rain,' and looking at myself in the mirror after watching it and perceiving myself as one of those people that I was just watching on T.V. It was just kind of a knowing that this would be the world that I would enter into. And that's what I did.
One of my realizations is that if you revel over joy, you're going to ache over pain and get killed over hurt. Your span of feelings are going to go just as far one way as the other.
I just feel like every kid is growing up too fast and they're seeing too much. Everything is about sex, and that's fine for me. I'm not saying I don't like it. But I don't think it should be everywhere, where kids are exposed to everything sexual. Because they have to have some innocence; there's just no innocence left.
Every now and then, I have blissful moments of thanking God for all the amazing things that are happening. When I leave the White House after just meeting Obama or when I see my face on the cover of 'Rolling Stone' or when I meet someone who tells me that their daughter is inspired by me, those are moments that are incredibly joyful.
In 1980, it cost just under $600 to take a round-trip flight within the United States.
I just go where the guitar takes me.
When we decided to go to Cuba to perform, we did it because we just wanted to build a bridge, you know, between Cuba and the rest of the community. And we just wanted to prove that music and art need to be over all ideology or way to think life, and we just wanted to go in there and play just because of love.
I'm a very direct person just generally. I don't use a lot of words unnecessarily. I try to get to the heart of the issue, address it and go on to the next thing.
Within loyalism and the UVF, there are clearly people who are not just aggravated by the issue around flags or parades. They're aggravated by me and Sinn Fein being in government. They're opposed to the political institutions - there's an inability of a minority within loyalism to accept the concept of equality.
It seems to me that election season is just a Petri dish for anger and cynicism.
I think that, whatever happens, I'm just happy I've written those songs and I've made an album. That's really big for me, and I'm proud of that.
Treat each case as an individual case, and give every man an opportunity to earn just as much money as he is capable of earning.
