Somebody said to me this morning, 'To what do you attribute your longevity?' I don't know. I mean, I couldn't have planned my life out better. By all accounts I should be dead! The abuse I put my body through: the drugs, the alcohol, the lifestyle I've lived the last 30 years!
The songs I've written that are the strongest, I'm like: 'I don't know where that came from. It just kind of popped out.' You feel you can't take a whole lot of credit for it. I didn't purposefully will it into existence.
Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.
Owners, the way they blackballed me from baseball, the way they used me, in a sense, and then the way they wanted to send a signal to the other players, saying, you know, we're going to get Jose Canseco out of the game. This is a cue or a message for you other guys to stop using steroids because the owners lost total control of the steroid use.
Oh absolutely. I had the pleasure to get to know a lot of really talented young actors before they even really hit it big. And yet what we all had and shared in common was a love for movies.
I always wanted to direct. I always saw myself as a director. I know that I've definitely found what I should be doing with my life. In my life, as far as my career goes, I always felt, as an actor, that it was something that would just be a temporary thing that would get me to what I wanted to do next. That's what my acting did.
The actor already comes with emotions to the scene: fear, the fear of being in front of the camera. It is this fear that spurs the emotion of the scene. I too am afraid; I don't know exactly what I am searching for. On the set, we are all participating in this fear together.
We set up one rule in our house, which is, 'Guests of guests cannot bring guests.' That rule was required because that happened one weekend, and we finally said, 'Okay, you know what? That's a little too much.'
For me, its like go ahead and eat. Live your life. I mean, I've just seen so much death, you know, as of late, being in my 40s, of people getting sick or, you know, whatever, that I just feel like, you know what? You never know with life. Eat. Enjoy yourself. Just try to be healthy and, you know, and watch it.
But I'm very happy to work within tight parameters, and when you know you have an actor for two days, and you have to get that work done in two days, that focuses the mind wonderfully.
I really love baseball. The guys and the game, and I love the challenge of describing things. The only thing I hate - and I know you have to be realistic and pay the bills in this life - is the loneliness on the road.
I always imagined that magically, at some point, I would settle into this very easy and refined sophistication, but it turns out that who you are at eleven is pretty much who you are at 27, so I don't know how much I've learned over the years.
'Beyond the Lights' was my fourth film. I gained a lot of knowledge, and I'm excited to share that with young filmmakers because I know how lost I was coming out of film school with that question of 'What's next?'
I don't know if I'll ever feel like I've made it. That is part of the reason why all of us, as artists, are always wanting more and working towards more and keeping busy. There is just so much that we all want to accomplish, and I just have so many goals that I haven't met yet.
But we talk about issues, we talk about people, we talk about personalities. George is a very good reader of people, and he's very perceptive about people, and you know, that's fine.
The first is that instead of writing a sequel, which is what most people do, this is in fact a prequel. Although we didn't know that when we began the process.
I don't think people know 'Nosfuratu.'
When you're really young, dating girls, and trying to explain Kiss, they just look at you like you're kind of crazy. I think they got so big in the Seventies and were such a phenomenon - they did the 'Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park' movie, the solo records - some people only know the merchandising stuff.
I'm a simple country neuroscientist, not an expert on democracy, but I do know something about how the brain works and how opinion-reinforcing bubbles can distort the picture of reality we build from the information we encounter on a daily basis.
At the start of my career, when I used to toss and turn at night, I was fighting that feeling and wanting to go to sleep. Now I know that's normal, so I'll just get up and watch TV or something. I know it's just my subconscious mind getting ready for a game.
We know with certainty that the Obama administration has re-defined 'militants' to include any military-age males they kill regardless of whether they were actually doing anything wrong. We know with certainty that the U.S. Government has detained and publicly branded as 'terrorists' people they knew at the time were innocent.
We really haven't had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don't know, frankly, how it would work under every scenario.
It's not easy to strap yourself down to a desk and bash on a keyboard when you know you can direct lots of films, because directing films is fun and interactive and gregarious. Writing isn't.
I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that!
My dad takes care of me as a manager and as a dad. That's his job, you know, to take care of me. He has my best interests at heart.
Golf is a thinking man's game. You can have all the shots in the bag, but if you don't know what to do with them, you've got troubles.
Cats know how to obtain food without labor, shelter without confinement, and love without penalties.
I look at actors like Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, and Benicio Del Toro, and they play all these different characters. I'm hoping that, in my lifetime, I'll be able to look back and say, 'You know what? I did all these different characters, and I enjoyed every single film I did.'
We're terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don't know.
Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.
I definitely liked the Muppets. I definitely liked Yoda in 'Empire Strikes Back' and Chewbacca. I don't know if I was a fan of puppets or those, like, specific characters.
I always watched movies and rooted for the bad guys, you know? I've always been that kind of guy. I still hold some respect for criminals that are good at their jobs.
When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across.
Whoever loves above all the approach of love will never know the joy of attaining it.
In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.
I try not to be cruel to people. I know there's a karma, and I'm constantly thinking of my blessings. I live and die by being a Baptist. If I can't go to church on a Sunday, I'll get a tape by the Clark Sisters and slide it in for the day.
