My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.
I think the therapeutic part of acting is allowing myself to step into another human being's shoes. It allows me the ability to release judgment, if I had any judgment to begin with. It's an opportunity to understand rather than to stand outside and point fingers.
I'm a believer in fate and in fulfilling your destiny. I've always had a kind of inner voice that I have learned to listen to.
I've been divorced and I had to get back out there be single again and do some of that in the genuinely miserable state where you really do wonder what the hell is going on. And you feel like trying to have casual conversation with someone you don't know on the surface of the moon or something.
I love the English spirit because when I was a player, I was an Englishman: I was fighting, and you had to kill me if you wanted to win.
The issue comes down to this: The NSA metadata-collection program costs lots of money, and had funds not been expended on it, they could have been used to support other programs that might have been far more effective in saving American lives.
With tough interpretation of taxi and zoning regulations, neither Uber nor Airbnb would have gotten started. By the time many cities recognized their existence, both were fairly large and had the political support of their customers.
I wash my face at night for sure. If I've had makeup, on I wash it twice. And now that I'm old, I use the Rapid Repair moisturizer, which has all the stuff in it - retinol, alpha, whatever, all of it. And I do use a Neutrogena eye cream, which I didn't used to.
I remember in 1978 meeting two Ugandan captains in the hotel talking Russian. They had been educated in Moscow and since they came from different Ugandan peoples, it was the only way they could understand one another.
I had an acting teacher tell me once that if you're playing a car salesman, you don't want to be an OK car salesman, you want to play the best car salesman.
The reason that ISIL was so successful, yes, it had to do with their capabilities and prowess on the battlefield, but they were dealing with a receptive constituency in northern Iraq because of the intense hatred of the Maliki government, which of course is imposing the Shia view on them.
I would always hunch over, I was always taller than the boys. I had the extremely skinny legs... I would double up my socks, those ones from Footlocker, to make my legs look thicker.
I was born three weeks early, and I kept being ill. From the age of zero to four, I was always in hospital having tests done, but they couldn't find out what was wrong. They discovered that one of my kidneys wasn't working properly, and it had scarred. I had to have 32 injections in my arm in the morning and evening to try and make me better.
The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified, skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.
For me to be able to punch above my weight creatively, to actually take a stand for what I was doing, I had to take on everything. I had to be the person who says, 'I wrote it. I directed it.'
Back in the days, we had to work with a shoestring budget. We had a movie screen, and we'd show movie trailers on them, and then we'd rip through it and started playing. Now we have a little money to play with to do a cool stage set.
I've said this: If Jim Leyland had been in my place, he'd have the 2,000 wins and I'd have 1,000. Leyland is the greatest.
The diagnosis was immediate: Masses matting the lungs and deforming the spine. Cancer. In my neurosurgical training, I had reviewed hundreds of scans for fellow doctors to see if surgery offered any hope. I'd scribble in the chart 'Widely metastatic disease - no role for surgery,' and move on. But this scan was different: It was my own.
A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller.
I write for kids because I think the most interesting (and most humorous) stories come from people's childhoods. When I was writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I had a blast talking on the phone to my younger brother, Patrick, remembering all of the things that happened to our family when we were growing up.
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
I had a strong, really good upbringing, not puritanical.
I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.
As I flew back from New Zealand to bury my mother, it occurred to me that no matter how harrowing her loss was and how keenly it will always be felt, there was, nevertheless, a sense of relief that my father, sisters and I could say a final goodbye after the longest goodbye and relief that my mum had finally been released.
The first time I ever acted was in 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and my first line was, 'I didn't know Shakespeare had a sister.'
I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.
My stormtrooper suit would chip underneath the armpits and in between the thighs. So they had to do a lot of editing for my costume and shave some areas down.
Definitely had a lot of training since a young age. My teachers in high school have always helped me, gave me encouragement, taught me so much.
I wasn't a comic book aficionado at all when I was a kid, but my cousin Weed was. Every time we went to visit him on the farm, he had two really fun things: comedy albums and comic books.
It was close to like a 67- or 70-day shoot for 'Tron' on stage, in the suit. You can't even sit down during the day because of all the cables that divide the foam rubber and all the electrical circuits. We had these stools that were tall with a bicycle seat on them and you're just looking at a blue screen all day.
The censors have always had a field day with James Joyce, specifically with 'Ulysses,' but also with his other writings. The conventional wisdom is that this is because of sexually explicit passages (and there certainly are those). I have always thought that what the critics hated and feared about Joyce is his cry for human freedom.
I lived on the farm with my parents and grandparents. I had no playmates as a young child, and I was indulged. I helped my grandmother piece quilts, and we made pretty albums, an old-fashioned pastime. We cut poems and pictures out of magazines.
For 10 years, I had a band called Steel Train. We made three albums. We toured like crazy.
I am the youngest of four children - three boys and one girl. I don't think becoming an actor had anything to do with seeking attention, though. My relationship with my siblings when I was growing up was close and playful.
I didn't really blossom until my mid teens, and by that time I had to work on my personality to make people like me. I found it easy to make people laugh and I was always pretty popular.
A novel is too much of a commitment. I tend to peruse Twitter - I check to see if I had any mentions and read the latest messages.
