I realize that everyone has their own road to travel in making this decision about when it's right to come out. I know that in my case, the worst fears never materialized. All in all, professionally, I know the work I do here every day is better because I'm honest about who I am.
I'm always put in the unfortunate position of asking people to donate money and people I know in bands to play benefit concerts and all this stuff.
I just love putting on the uniform; it's what I have done since I was 6 or 7 years old. It's the life I know. If I didn't love the life of baseball, I wouldn't work out like I do every winter.
I don't know where my fashion sense comes from, exactly. I've always been interested in, not necessarily being unique, but not necessarily sticking to the preexisting paradigm - whether it be clothes or music or whatever.
This is a lifetime job. You don't look at it, you know, now and then. It doesn't really matter. When the market comes down, then I buy my land very cheaply, so I make my money on that.
I have 7,000 DVDs and Blu-rays. I have thousands of books - thousands - and roughly 15,000 comic books or something like that, hundreds of books about different art movements - the symbolists, the dadaists, the Pre-Raphaelites, the impressionists - you know, that I consult before I start every movie.
I want to know why I read as a child with such a frantic appetite, why I sucked the words off the page with such an edge of desperation.
Many of the racial problems in America are caused by the fact that people are innately tribal, and politicians know how to exploit that biological fact.
I don't know if the money I've earned is going to need to last me for the next few weeks or the rest of my life.
The thing that I like about action sequences is that if they're done well, you get to know more about the character in those few minutes than you do through 10 minutes of exposition.
You can watch actors create their illusions, but if you don't see where they get the pigeons from, you don't really know how they're doing it.
I always tell the story of 'Irreplaceable.' I initially wrote 'Irreplaceable' with myself in mind, with plans of it being my record. I love that record; however, what I realised about that record was that though given the circumstances of that situation - men and women are not that different - when you sing about it, it changes things, you know?
I don't know why someone else's marriage has anything to do with me.
My roommate and my boyfriend, they both know I am compulsive and controlling.
I like bowling. I suck at it, but I like it. You know what's so funny? I have days when I'm absolutely great at doing it, and then I have days when I just don't understand it.
Most of the musicians that I know almost to the man everybody uses Apple computers. They've thought of the steps that you're going to think of when you're trying to create your thing. And that's where the tools get invented to make better art.
Literally, when I go to the vocal coach, I'm like, 'You are teaching me nothing.' You know?
I want people to think about movies and how we watch them. Let them know it's okay to question the structure or how we're sometimes duped into a false sense of normalcy. Most of all, I want people to question the old standard practices of, 'This is how the structure of something should work,' or, 'This is how a character must behave.'
I don't know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago.
You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.
I think the perception of me can be, you know, confused. But that's only because people only see that side of me when I'm at work, in front of the camera. So they don't see Miranda at home; they don't see behind the scenes. They see the glamour of it all but they don't see Miranda standing barefoot in a dirty old house.
I sometimes buy albums that I don't like now, but that I know I will like. Coming out was the same thing. In high school, I thought, 'I know I'm going to have to deal with this, but I'm not confident enough now.' But when I finally did, my whole life changed.
Meetings with no goal, also known as 'coffee shop' meetings, can be huge time wasters if you're not efficient with them. 'Always know why you're meeting, and make sure it's important - try to keep them to 30 minutes, max.
You can get a bit bored of finding out about yourself. I know nothing about politics, for instance. There's nothing that's stopped me picking up a newspaper in the past, and it's something I really should start to do.
I called my book 'When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead' because that's the truth. I will keep talking until the big hand comes down from Heaven. But I am a spiritual man and I believe that even that does not have to be the end.
I think that anyone who likes writing views 'The New Yorker' as the, you know, pinnacle of the publishing world. If you get 50 words published in 'The New Yorker,' it's more important than 50 articles in other places. So, would I love to one day write for them? I guess. But that's not my sole ambition.
How we absorb music is unique. I know what I do. When I'm listening to music, I tend to find myself in a song. That's what really makes you connect is if you feel what that song is saying.
You know, 'Viggo' is a pretty dorky name in Denmark. It's like 'Oswald' or something. It's a very old Scandinavian name, at least 1,000 years old.
You never know, the way technology is going, we might all use the games for scouting by the time I retire.
My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.
I work 'cause I have to pay the bills. But I also work 'cause I love it. I don't know what I'd do with me if I didn't have this work. It's what I've done all my life. It's my motivation. It's my satisfaction. It's my joy to stand in front of an audience to sing, to come back home and write songs. Man, it's amazing for me.
In between that time, I've done book narrating, you know, books on tape for Dove Audio.
Being a parent has taught me a lot of things already, you know, though it's only been a year and half, and has made me address parts of myself that I would otherwise live in comfortable denial of, or you know and - you know, for instance, my self-loathing.
I don't want to share my worries - that's for me to know.
Mostly, when I travel, I want to represent my own work well and let others know how I feel about poetry being an important part of life.
What I really want out of life is to discover something new: something mankind didn't know was possible to do.
