I am a firm believer that you can make a difference in someone's life - whether they're thousands of miles away, or on your own block.
Playing a robot is possibly the most difficult role you can have as an actor, because you have to take all your innate emotional responses and completely suppress them. Even the way you walk is affected.
I don't know how many people really knew who I was before the Olympics and that's the fun thing of the Olympics - you get to know someone who captures your heart, hopefully.
If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.
Forty-two years ago, I came to America from communist Cuba so I might have a better way of life, a freer way of life - a more democratic way of life. I wanted to live the American Dream where if you worked hard and put your mind to the task, anything was possible.
My sister died and my mum was really distant, as you do - you don't expect your offspring to die before you. I thought I was bulletproof up until that stage.
Let me tell you something: if you're on an island for three and a half months and you're four and a half hours by boat from the nearest store, and there's nobody but 30 crew members on the island, I guarantee that you'd be running around without your clothes on.
In films, the fact that you can always do a scene again takes a load off your mind, enabling you to strive for perfection, which I always wanted.
You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.
Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert.
Unlike life, you've got more or less complete control over what's going on in your stories. That's not to say you can make characters do whatever you want them to - they usually have a life of their own if you've done your job properly.
The effort required by your endeavor now is not as hard as dealing with your regret later.
I always loved singing, but I thought it was like drawing - just something you do in your own little corner to calm yourself down. But when my friend, the French songwriter Etienne Daho, listened to my songs, he was so moved that told me that I had to do a demo, share them with the world.
There's a lot of things that go into scoring touchdowns and leading your team. It's not just the game itself, but going back and studying tape to pick apart everything I did. It's nice to have something to go on, doing it full speed in a game situation.
To represent your country at a home Olympics is something special and I'm over the moon to be selected for Team GB. I was pleased to get the qualifying time in Berlin earlier this year and my sole focus is getting in the right shape for London.
I would say the larger the pool you have to select from, the more likely you are to find the most compatible person for you if you have the right algorithms working on your behalf.
It's such a funny thing when you see your daughter transitioning from your baby, your little girl, to suddenly being a young woman. If you're not really looking for it, you can miss it, and Lily-Rose is on that road already, and there's nothing I can do to stop it.
I think there's a level of ignorance, when, in the callowness of youth, you imagine that you are inventing the world for the first time. You imagine that your parents don't know what it feels like to fall in love.
A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded pistol on your coffee table - There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about it.
If you have a dream, just lie about it. Lie your way unto your dreams.
You can be an idiot and survive because you just go to McDonalds for your food, and you go to work and do some sort of inane job, which is nobody taking any responsibility - it's always up the line - and then you watch the Super Bowl, and that's it. But in the old days, you really had to know how your world works. You don't need that anymore.
It isn't glamorous until after the film is finished, and you are at the premiere and getting your picture on the cover of magazines.
If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.
When it's your chance to step up to the plate, just hit it out of the park, and everybody will forget about everything that came before.
Well, there's a morality in that you want your work to be good, I suppose.
Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.
Your ideas and the things that you do are dumb and stupid and make no sense - until you start getting recognized and making money. Then you're a genius.
You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.
On average, spending time with your boss is consistently rated as the least pleasurable activity in a given day.
What do you want? What do you want your life to be? What do you want your testimony to be? Go for it!
I just want to make a point that it's not just great teachers that sometimes shape your life. Sometimes it's the absence of great teachers that shapes your life and being ignored can be just as good for a person as being lauded.
It's odd doing a movie, and then a year and half later having to go to a premiere and talk about what you did, and get dressed up and have your picture taken.
Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.
None can less afford to delay than the aged sinner. Now is the time. Now or never. You have, as it were, one foot already in the grave. Your opportunities will soon be over. Strive, then, I entreat you, to enter in at the strait gate.
I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.
