One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.
I watch mostly documentaries and things that aren't remotely funny.
Acting was always something fun to do on the side growing up, but I never really took it seriously. I would do a commercial every few months, and that paid my school tuition. But in high school, I was mostly into sports and didn't go out for stuff during those seasons.
I think Hollywood makes the mistake of mixing all these identities and cultures, mostly from the Middle East.
Being all about me is not a good thing - I don't care what 1978 tried to say - because as long as you mostly think about yourself, you're not going to be a wonderful person. You're just not.
The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety.
I think I'm writing for an intelligent stranger - you know, in my mind I can't remember who coined that phrase first. I don't want to write anything that makes me cringe, first of all. I cringe a lot - mostly when I hear popular music.
There's also the tradition of voodoo, the Haitian magic arts, in New Orleans. And because New Orleans is below sea level, when they bury people in New Orleans, it's mostly above ground. So you have this idea that the spirits are more accessible and can access you more easily because they're not even buried.
You see very senior women leaving technology and the men stay, mostly because they feel quite isolated and are isolated by the very systems.
Being an emcee onstage is mostly about crowd control, about monitoring energy levels.
The Keystone pipeline is one of those things that's sort of a political driver. And mostly, the Republicans use it to sort of embarrass the president and embarrass quite a few Democrats who feel that there's a potential for an environmental disaster.
Mostly I listen to old-time music, some bluegrass, some Americana stuff, too many to name. But of the younger acts, there are The Freight Hoppers, who were big in the '90s, and The Foghorn Stringband from Oregon, and there's a lot of young string bands coming up now, basically punkers who play acoustic instruments forming new bands.
Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free.
I would always contend that talent is an element, but over the long run, ultimately, a minor part of it all; it is mostly hard work.
My home life now is mostly women. They are better than us. They make me better.
Every teenage artist out there is mostly talking about boys, and I think there's so much more to being a teenager than just boys.
What I think of as 'freakonomics' is mostly storytelling around an idea - not a theme but an idea. I like ideas much more than themes. Themes are boring. Themes are, 'Wool is back,' but ideas are, 'Why is wool back?'
I'd say mostly I paint hot chicks.
I read books all the time. I'm just half looking for something to do; I mostly just read for pleasure. Occasionally I stumble across something that could be a movie, but I don't put a book down just because I don't see a movie in it, either.
I'm a normal consumer but try to do the best I can. I try to buy locally, and I mostly avoid supermarkets.
The acting training in school was great, but it was mostly fun being young and in New York. Because my upbringing was so transient, New York ended up being my home. I've been living in New York longer than I have anywhere else in my life.
Eliminating some 3600 post offices - mostly rural - will save the USPS less than seven tenths of one percent of their operating budget, but nationally, a number of tribal communities will be hit.
I wholeheartedly rejected anything remotely feminine but was not enthusiastic about anything masculine, either. I did not want to cook and have babies, and I did not want to be an engineer or a baseball player or a soldier or a politician or any of the myriad careers open mostly or solely to men. I wanted to be a poet.
I'm into clothes, but in a way that's related to wanting to walk into a film noir movie. You know, I love to go to vintage stores, but mostly it's stuff that I don't have anywhere to wear... I don't have the life that goes with the clothes.
I have an RSS reader, Feeddler. I mostly subscribe to board game blogs - they have reviews of new games and discussions about trends. It's straight-up dork talk.
Mostly I'm writing about people, so I feel constrained to take with me my view of people, my curiosity about how people choose the things they do and why they come to certain decisions in a certain fashion and all the things that drive most writers.
Some versions of crab cakes are mostly crabmeat lightly bound with egg, but I'm a firm believer that a crab cake should contain bread crumbs.
When like-minded people, talking mostly with one another, end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk... If you put a bunch of rebels in a room and ask them to discuss rebellion, they'll get more extreme.
I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.
I mostly want to be friends with my children.
Musically, what happened was this: I retired twice. I retired after The Black Crowes, and I retired after Brand New Immortals. Then, we started buying real estate, which really took up my time. I was busy. I was still teaching yoga, but I was mostly busy running business, and I was fine. I was happy.
I'd say that I'm super proud of only four or five things I've done, but mostly I'd like to be remembered as a really good actor who people enjoyed watching.
One of my books, 'Rain Falling on My Face,' earned me the 39th Edogawa Ranpo prize. It's a very prestigious literary prize in Japan, mostly for mysteries and thrillers.
When you're out there talking about your faith and what you believe in, you'll face some backlash. But mostly, I've received support.
If you read a story with an 'I' or a 'he' or a 'she,' you're in familiar territory - but 'we' is mostly unexplored. I think of 'we' as an adventure.
The hardest part about writing fiction is finding long stretches of time to do it: for me, this means writing mostly on Saturdays and Sundays. But I am always thinking about my characters, jotting down ideas in stolen moments and hoping I'll be able to make sense of them when the weekend rolls around.
