All my life, all I've wanted to do was a talk show, and I've done it for most of my life. Now to break away from that is kind of a challenge.
Being in the spotlight, you know, you tend to kind of forget who you are. And being an artist... it could be a very superficial job. It could be very pretentious as well.
In the book, America had already been weakened by bio terror plagues before waves of selfish violence took down the rest. But the real enemy was the kind of male human being who nurses fantasies of violent glory at the expense of his fellow citizens.
You know, as an only child, you're kind of in a bubble, and there are all sorts of things about my childhood that I still can't really place.
That's kind of just the nature of our business, is that you're really putting a lot of energy and time and care into something that isn't necessarily going to last forever.
What actor do you really take seriously who becomes a singer? It's kind of ridiculous. I can't think of anybody.
It's kind of selfish to say that you're only going to fight for a victory that you will live to see.
I don't know if it's a movement, but the only thing new that's happening is that I think music and art and video and fashion are all kind of thrown into one big ball that's on television, and people see that all the time - you see a fusion of all those things.
I'm kind of in between a goody-goody and a rebel. I'm not bad, but I'm not good either. I'm a little crazy.
What are the aspects of yourself that line up with the character? You magnify those, and the ones that don't match up you kind of kick to the curb.
Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.
I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.
I tell you, it was kind of two-fold. I fortunately had a lot of support. My coach was amazing - he told me to focus on being prepared and that is what I did. Every athlete is nervous - any athlete who tells you they're not nervous isn't telling you the truth. I was as prepared as I could be.
I never felt comfortable in real life very well. It's always been an awkward kind of thing for me and so when I hit the stage I just sensed freedom. I sensed, 'Here's a place that I can have all the experiences of life and not feel uncomfortable about it.'
I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Christopher Reeve did such an amazing job that to give him some kind of accent or more bravado would have been wrong. Audiences wouldn't have responded to that either.
I like that 'Pitch Perfect' is one of my first forays into film and just being seen in that kind of light, aside from some people who know me from 'Spring Awakening' or the other things that I've done. I think in so many ways it's kind of like my own 'Glee' or 'Smash'.
Actually I did, because I saw the film like everyone else, ten years ago and I remembered some of it. I just wanted to see it, to kind of remember the tone a little bit.
It's amazing to hear, as a voice matures and then starts to decline, what kind of emotion is still conveyed by a really good vocalist.
I am really looking for a chance to direct. I feel like that's kind of the next frontier for me. I know that it's really hard to do, but I feel like I want to have a chance to try and translate something I've written and try and get a tone across.
I kind of like to be one of the guardians of the game.
First off, I could never become a doctor. Blood? Even the fake blood on 'American Horror Story,' I'm kind of ready to hurl.
It's just a goatee. That sounds kind of weird. A soul patch? I don't know how 'soul' it is.
It used to be that you needed a $500-million-a-year company in order to reach a worldwide audience of consumers. Now, all you need is a Steam account. That changes a whole bunch of stuff. It's kind of a boring 'gee, information processing changes a stuff' story, but it's going to have an impact on every single company.
The first time I met President Obama was 2006 in Baghdad. He was the senator from Illinois; it was a month before he actually ended up declaring. He had to come to Baghdad to kind of check that box, and I was the correspondent for 'Newsweek' at the time.
I don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. 'Ally' presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists.
When you come off 'The X Factor,' you're more likely to be a failure than a success because people almost want you to fail. There's this kind of feeling that you're separate from everyone else. You get it from artists, people in the industry, people at record labels.
Don't you think it would be great to do a bunch of Nicorette commercials? Just, like, me in the desert, kind of Marlboro Man-style, driving a fast car, pulling over, looking at the sunset. Dissolving in ecstasy. Can't you see it? Me blowing huge Nicorette bubbles.
But really, for the most part - doing a prequel is great because you do have room to kind of free this character and how they got to where they are instead of being a slave to exactly what the previous actor did.
So far, at least, I haven't found a way to tell my kind of stories without making them both sad and funny.
There is only one kind of freedom and that's individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.
I think my biggest learning experience is that it's okay to be who you are - you don't have to exactly fit the mold of what people think a certain kind of career is. I think that discovery - of really knowing who I am and being okay with that and loving myself - was amazing.
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
The first white men of your people who came to our country were named Lewis and Clark. They brought many things that our people had never seen. They talked straight. These men were very kind.
I wasn't the kind of kid who would get A's without even trying. I had to work to get good grades, but I was very organised about it because I always wanted to do well at everything I did. I'm very competitive.
The actors are in control, getting outrageous amounts of money. The reason they're getting this kind of money is because the studios don't know what else to do. They don't have a clue about what to do except to pay an actor a lot of money.
