Sometimes I used to think to myself, 'Have I lost a sense of humor?' but I don't think that I have. I think one can be as snarky and sarcastic as lots of people, but I have never found that it makes me particularly happy.
Well, I've never looked upon myself as being a beauty, per se.
I'm excited by challenging myself physically and mentally every day.
Like when I'm singing live I can't hear myself. I'm just listening to the rest of the band. To listen to my voice, it doesn't even feel like it's me.
I don't think of myself as a writer.
I'm quite an independent person, and I had to be. As a boy and growing into a young man I had to look out for myself. And now I'm very family-oriented. It's a big priority in my life.
I have always been terrified of the death of my parents. I never knew if I could count on myself. I never knew if that would send me over the edge.
When I'm meditating on an idea, I try to let the idea completely saturate me to the point where I feel like I'm covering myself in it or totally immersing myself in it, so that everywhere I'm looking, everywhere I'm going, it's through the lens of that idea. And that's sort of what I do with the music - I try to lose myself in it.
People used to come knocking on my door saying, 'Your trouble is that you're a sex symbol who doesn't do enough sexy things.' I'd say to myself, 'You think that if you pressure me I'll fold.' But if I did it, all it would mean is that I sold out.
I want to make myself and the crowd happy by way of something different, and that makes things difficult. I'm never playing something that hasn't been released or no one has ever heard before because I care to deliver them what they were hoping to see from me. But also I play four or five songs that will definitely surprise them.
I'm going to stop when I'm 100. I put a limit on myself.
I stopped watching horror movies after I watched 'Candyman' when I was - I don't know, fifteen or something. I remember my sister rented it, 'Candyman,' and it really, really scared me. And so it was only after I found myself in a horror film that I really went back and kind of rediscovered the genre.
I kind of have to take pieces of myself to fit what it is that radio wants.
Having travelled to some 20 African countries, I find myself, like so many other visitors to Africa before me, intoxicated with the continent. And I am not referring to the animals, as much as I have been enthralled by them during safaris in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Rather, I am referring to the African peoples.
Rather than writing about my experiences with other people, 'Ugly Cherries' is the first song I've ever written about myself. It's a confrontation: an attempt to unpack my own queerness with humor and self care.
Early on, I said to myself that I would like to write a kind of moral and spiritual history of a place. It sounds a little pretentious, I know. But that's really what I set for myself.
I think it's really rare to see women on television who are brilliant, selfish, vain, fallible - and I feel like I have all those capacities in myself, so it's good to see people in the media representing all of those things.
I literally cannot remember a time when I was not asking myself what events in 'Star Wars' were like for Princess Leia. The good side of all this is that what looked like 'goofing off' or 'daydreaming' these many years has all turned out to be valuable career preparation.
I played football for 12 years, but I would always trick myself into exercise, like by taking a dance class.
I said if I ever conducted, I would always give myself the best chance to succeed - though sometimes, despite everything, you still fail.
I don't see myself in any way in elective office.
But I don't think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director.
I don't have a problem if someone else were to say that one of my characters is a good one and another one is not and is a bad one. I try myself not to have any judgment towards my characters, but certainly the audience might.
I just have to be myself. I'm not perfect, and I'm going to make mistakes; I might say the wrong thing. I have to be responsible to my community, and I feel like I am, but then I have to not be so hard on myself.
I said, 'I'll give myself two years. If I can't support myself as an actress within two years, then I'll go back to choreography.'
Whether I'm making a recipe or a piece of jewelry or a white-rose-and-jasmine tea or the perfume, I like to think of myself as a happy little sorceress, and if I could just have a little general store with all that stuff and give people a sense of my taste, that would be lovely.
I think of myself as being a bit of a wimp deep down - a bourgeois wimp - and I'm fighting that. I think all Brits are, maybe.
I always tell myself that when you're playing a character, pretend they're on trial and you're giving the best witness of their life. You really need to think about every element of the character and represent them properly, as if they were a real person. You want to give 100 percent of what they're worth and what they deserve as people.
I regard myself as someone who is retired but who occasionally goes out to work.
I beg you be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.
I'm just a purist. What is important in my life is that I can do something that can influence many people and influence China's development. When I am myself, I am relaxed and happy and have a good result.
As a musician myself, it annoys the hell out of me to watch an actor trying to play a guitar out of time with the music.
I gotta say, as the father of two beautiful young daughters, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
Thinking back on it, I just really didn't have very many role models to look up to when it came to Asian actresses. And in that way, when I would see an Asian onscreen, it would be a secondary-type thing, and that's kind of how I ended up viewing myself in the world: as secondary.
In the case of 'News Radio,' I loved that show. I loved the actors and the producers, but I was longing very much for something more to sink my teeth into me. I think it was an incredibly smart show, but I found myself on the peripheral of a lot of it.
