I was on holiday recently and I came home to find that one of the papers here had 'bikini'd' me on the beach. I was wearing a grossly unflattering costume and they had published photographs of me taken from behind. I looked dreadful. I went into our local newsagent and bought up every copy.
The muscles in my lower abdomen had torn off my pelvis.
As a student, I had stayed with Winston Churchill; later, I had lunched with Harold Macmillan - in fact, had met most of the post-war prime ministers of Great Britain from Douglas-Home to Tony Blair.
As a boy I believed I could make myself invisible. I'm not sure that I ever could, but I certainly had the ability to pass unnoticed.
'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia.
I thank the Lord for having the kind of a career that doesn't happen very often to an individual. A lot of times when I was playing, I pinched myself to see if it was really me and if it was really happening. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change anything.
I have fun with it and I am honest and open about the way I lead my life and don't mislead anyone. I've had the time of my life and thank God for that, it would be such a waste otherwise.
I've had a deep love affair with skiing for many years.
My dad had an aunt at the turn of the century who died from diabetes, but she was the closest affected relative in my family.
When I started music, I started out in Puerto Rico with classical music. But what really made me want to be a musician was jazz, and because I didn't grow up with jazz, I had to learn it from a very basic level. I had to go into the history and learn everything about the development of the music, all the players and all that stuff.
I had a passion to not be a secretary forever. I was mindful of the customary career trajectory, and I knew I had to do something remarkable.
The president and I had much more important stuff to talk about than Donald Trump. I've never discussed Mr. Trump with the president of the United States.
Explorations into chemistry were done in our basement, sometimes with friends, and my parents must have had quite a bit of confidence in my abilities when they allowed me to experiment with explosive mixtures.
I just wrote about childhood as I had known it.
Sometimes I really need the money, really need to go straight to work. But if I had the absolute choice - money no object, my mortgage paid off - I'd really just work once or twice a year - but wouldn't everybody! - or at least do a different job sometimes.
I wouldn't have become an engineer, I wouldn't have done what I did, had a hand not been held out to me. I have to remember who helped me when I needed help. The people of Jamaica helped me. I can't forget that. I would be ungrateful if I forgot.
When I was young, I colored in the line drawings in vintage editions of the Oz books that had been handed down through generations in my family. This was a bad thing to do.
I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.
Jesus of Nazareth was the most famous human being who ever lived on this planet, and he had no infrastructure, and it's never been done. He had no government, no PR guy, no money, no structure. He had nothing, yet he became the most famous human being ever.
I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.
The Kennedys tried to avoid using the big U-shaped table, but when they couldn't, they had several tricks - including keeping the flowers simple - to keep it from appearing overly stiff and formal.
I would never make a purely autobiographical movie, because it would be incredibly boring. But I always bring something. It's usually some emotional truth I've experienced, like in 'Get Him to the Greek,' the relationship between Jonah Hill and Elisabeth Moss, I had certainly had that kind of relationship with a girlfriend.
The one I have the most angst towards would be YouTube. We had an opportunity to invest, and I just got nervous about the media industry's response to the unlicensed content on the site.
To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.
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.'
Virtually every scientist now concedes that universe and time itself had beginning. So, whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe must have had a cause.
My debut feature, 'The Baby-Sitters Club,' got good reviews and made good money for what it cost. But it took me six years to get to direct my second feature. I think a guy would have had another movie out the same year.
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.
It's a nice reader, but there's nothing on the iPad I look at and say, 'Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.'
Some stories, my property, have been stolen. Someone's appropriated them. It's an illicit act. It's unfair. Suppose you had a coat you liked, and somebody went into your closet and stole it. That's how I feel.
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.
When I was a kid, I was kind of obsessed with that movie 'Dick Tracy.' Burger King had all this 'Dick Tracy' stuff, and I collected all of it, and I had the posters, and I watched it on a loop.
All of my life I have asked the question, 'Who would I be if I had grown up in a loving home?' And I have no way to answer it. I don't know if I would be placid and satisfied with whatever is around me - a happy, jolly, sedentary person.
I've had friends of mine say, like, they're tired of 'gayface,' and I was like, 'What's gayface?' They were like, 'It's the gay version of blackface: like, come in and be more effeminate.'
I had such high expectations of myself. I was going to be the best mother, the best housewife, the best entertainer, the best nurse, you know - what it was, I was going to be the best. And I could never live up to my expectations.
I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100%, because I had never reached true failure.
