Back in third grade, they used to say, 'Take whatever talent you have and think of something you can do with it.' I liked to draw, but what could I do with it? Maybe I could be an art dealer - nah, can't see myself doing that. Maybe I could do commercial arts?
I find writing extremely difficult. I usually have to drag myself to my desk, mainly because I doubt myself. And it's getting harder because I want to improve with every book.
It's hard for me to articulate myself.
Nothing in life prepared me for the way I felt about being a mother. Until then, I sort of felt like a blank sheet of paper. I was always trying to second-guess myself, to be what others wanted me to be.
I consider myself an actor who is funny.
I pride myself in the fact that in the six months tour of Cinderella, I didn't take one show off.
I did community theater in Georgia and called myself a ballet dancer.
The stand up, everything was accidental. I never grew up and was the class clown and had to get the attention. It was - it really is, I have a career despite myself.
When my wife gets mad at me, I remind myself that she is much smarter than I am and so I probably deserve it, even if I don't really understand it!
I don't go back and read my own stuff too much, but there are times where I second-guess myself and said I could have done something different, like a line of dialogue.
I think I have a part of myself which is a woman. When girls are together, they speak completely differently than when there is a guy around. But, with me, they don't see this masculine thing stopping them, and there is not this boundary.
I don't talk about myself in the third person, and I laugh at people who do.
I'm very blue collar myself. So it was easy for me to embody that in a sense. It's much harder for me to embody Norrell than it is to embody Terry Donovan.
I read somewhere that when I go on stage, people realize that they're not me and they feel better. When I walk off the stage, people know who I really am. I'm not saying it's great comedy, cool comedy or better comedy - but that's what I do, and I do it first for myself.
When I work, I like to just kind of stay quiet, stay to myself. I like to walk around a lot and figure out what's gonna happen in the scene and try to get my head straight.
I almost never have a plan for myself... I'm not ambitious in that way.
I almost had to exhaust myself at modeling before I could say, 'O.K., I'm ready for school.'
I should like to present myself to the young painters of the year 2000 with the wings of a butterfly.
The producing side is always a hard thing for me. I look at Flying Lotus and see producers dropping instrumentals, and I think I should do it myself. I just try to be an artist for myself. That way, it's a lot easier.
I always imagined myself somehow as an electron around some atom, and you're just, like, bouncing around and spinning. There was a never-ending supply of places to go, people to see, things to do, and fitting it all in became kind of an art.
I feel like I have a job to do, like I constantly have to reinvent myself. The more I up the ante for myself, the better it is in the long run. I try to interact with my fans as much as possible. It's good that the person I'm being onstage isn't really an act. It's really me.
Over my career, I've reinvented myself numerous times. I covered the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA. I wrote about labor wars, trade wars and real wars. I chronicled a nuclear plant meltdown and the defeat of Communism. I co-founded a couple of media businesses.
I just have to express myself somehow, either through singing, dance or fitness. You get sick of it; you have days where you think you don't want to do it, but generally after I've done something, I feel better. That's why I do the exercise: to earn my bar of chocolate and cappuccino.
The finest lesson I've learned with age is that all I need is a small team of comrades who inspire me, try not to judge me, and remind me when I'm judging myself.
I may appear to be full of myself because I always want better.
As much as I would love to do roles in big movies and am keen to establish myself in the industry. I don't want to sacrifice things that I really enjoy, like spending time with my family and friends.
'In My Hands,' the title track, is my very first vocal attempt, and I'm not a singer as such. But I've always wanted to express myself vocally on my albums, and I don't really have much of a capability for singing. The strength is in, I think, the lyrics and just speaking. It just comes from inside.
I'll admit, sometimes I've paid the bills with acting. You know the phrase, 'It's one for the money, two for the showreel.' I don't want that as a director. I don't want to compromise myself. There's a big old wide world out there. I want to explore it.
If you had asked me when I was in Yale, I would tell you I never would have thought it would happen because I just didn't think of myself of having the Hollywood look.
When I was eight, I bought my first puppet. It was a monkey, and I paid five cents for it. I collected some scrap wood and built myself a puppet theatre. I made 32 cents with my first show, which I thought was pretty good, and that's when I knew I would be a puppeteer when I grew up.
I don't like it when a player says, 'I like freedom; I want to play for myself.' Because the player has to understand he is part of a team with 10 other players. If everyone wants to be a jazz musician, it will be chaos. They will not be a team, and nothing will be possible.
I myself am not particularly interested in restaurant cooking. I don't really want to learn how to make a napoleon. I'd much rather learn how to make a very good lemon cake, which you can make in your own home. I like plain, old-fashioned home food.
I simply take serious issues seriously, but I do not take myself seriously.
I don't always have to be on what is the newest in music is. I'm slowly educating myself in music. For me, I feel more free in not knowing everything in what I'm doing. You can start making up too many rules for yourself. It should just be love and fun and feeling good.
But I deal with this meditating and by understanding I've been put on the planet to serve humanity. I have to remind myself to live simply and not to overindulge, which is a constant battle in a material world.
I see myself as a social conservative, but I think that there are lots of social institutions that produce beneficial reforms, like public hospitals, for instance, and schools.
