I've been acting for a long time now, but as narcissistic as this sounds - and I don't mean it to sound - every time I see my name up there, there is real sense of pride.
Work done by other people sounds easy. How hard can it be to take care of a newborn who sleeps 20 hours a day? How hard can it be to keep track of your billable hours? To travel for one night for business? To get a 4-year-old ready for school? To return a few phone calls? To load the dishwasher? To fill out some forms?
What makes people successful in this business is to be yourself on camera. Sounds simple. It's not.
When I'm in England, I know I'm a visitor, but being a white man in England with ancestry that's German and Italian, I have a history with the Romans and the Saxons. I feel some connection and ancestry here, as weird as that sounds.
This sounds like a brag, but I know how to make good fried rice. I learned in college. There are two secrets - take the rice after you cook it and let it get cold in the fridge. Then cook the egg like you're making a fried egg and just before it's done, dump the rice and veg on it and swirl it around.
I prefer people to say to me, 'You're one of my favorite actors,' rather than 'You're one of my favorite character actors.' It sounds like a slam. At least it sounds that way to me.
I don't particularly like children. That sounds awful, but I have nothing to say to them.
You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.
I have a work-out regime; I am not a maniac. It sounds cliche, but stand-up comedy, doing a one-man show, helps keep me young, and yes, it is exhausting, but I don't collapse.
For me, riding a two-wheeler bike was very risky. Counting the pedal strokes before turning a corner and learning to hear the sounds coming from buildings, grass and the climbing frame made all the difference to basic survival and ensured that I didn't end up head-first in the sandpit.
I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person.
I gave my heart to the Lord, and I remember the incident vividly. The Lord spoke to me. I know that sounds funny. It was not an audible voice or anything of that nature.
I know my life story sounds too extraordinary to be true.
That's the way I look at things - if you focus on the worst case scenario and it happens, you've lived it twice. It sounds like Pollyanna-ish tripe but I'm telling you - it works for me.
My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.
I've learned to start from a really sound argument, boil down the essence of what you're trying to say, then build your humor around that, rather than starting with, 'This sounds funny,' and going from there.
'Spiritual' sounds like you worship the grass.
You really have to stay true to yourself, as cheesy as that sounds. And you cannot take no for an answer, and you have to dream big. I think that's the greatest thing my family ever taught me: if you're going to dream, you have to dream so big.
I grew up in a kibbutz in the Galilee, but we were surrounded by Arabic villages, so I heard all these sounds and all this music. My father was very close friends with one of the Bedouin tribes, so I would always go there, to weddings, and I was always very fascinated by that music.
I found many ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse before reading anything aloud to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words.
I prefer to stay in if I have a choice. I lose energy being around people. I know that sounds horrible.
It even sounds stupid to hear myself say the first costume designer I worked with was Catherine Martin, and she won an Oscar for it, but that was just my very lucky draw of roll of the dice.
I wouldn't say my mother was my best friend, because that sounds odd, but we have a really tight bond and she is my friend on Facebook. Although she only goes on it to check up on me and sometimes we argue about it.
I know it sounds like I'm playing all these wives and girlfriends, but they're not waiting at home. I wear the pants.
I love food: biscuits and gravy, cheese grits, spaghetti and meatballs, chicken-fried steak with white gravy... but my favorite dish is my wife's beanie weenie cornbread casserole. It's so good. It sounds stupid, but if you eat it, it's heaven. Of course, it's only something you can eat if you've got a lot of money.
Whenever you're dealing with something that's difficult to describe, that you can't get across to someone in a sound bite, it sounds like the normal default is to pick what's easiest, and in the case of fiction written by women, fiction involving women, fiction involving any sort of relationship, the word that comes to mind is 'romance.'
Elton John can be a master of the sleight of hand. The arrangements make it seem like there are substantial melodies underneath the tracks - but almost nothing demands repeated listenings. Similarly, he always sounds like he's singing up a storm, but his voice glosses over the material, reducing most things to an uninteresting sameness.
The most powerful political voices are those with a different way of seeing and processing the world and the sounds that emanate from it.
Always be different; don't follow the rules. Don't do what anyone tells you. Don't use the same sounds as people; don't use the same drums as people.
Hip-hop is one of the most free art forms there is. There's so many sounds you can use, so many things you can bring in. You never know, man. I bet years ago people would've never said they would hear me with Rick Ross, and we did four classic songs together.
Everything that has a spare piano is 'like Satie' and everything with strings is 'filmic,' Sometimes I get annoyed when they say my stuff sounds 'like Satie'. No, it doesn't. At least, I don't think so.
My story sort of sounds ridiculous because the first movie I produced was 'E.T.'
On first listening, Joni Mitchell's 'Court And Spark,' the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions.
My favourite word? I think, delicious, because it sounds so delicious. You say it, and you just wanna eat a chocolate bar.
'What is this', and 'How is this done?' are the first two questions to ask of any work of art. The second question immediately illuminates the first, but it often doesn't get asked. Perhaps it sounds too technical. Perhaps it sounds pedestrian.
I just like music that sounds like music. Not like machines and computers and things that you design to make things sound slick and perfect.