In my 20s, I could just power through stuff and be fine, but now, in your 40s? It's kind of like Kobe Bryant. He plays basketball a little bit differently than he did when he first started out.
Even from the age of about 6 years old, I was kind of made to feel different by other kids - you know, I was a quite pretty kid, and I got called 'girl' a lot, and 'woman' and all of that. And school is really not a place to be different.
When you're in a band that's so big when you're young, you kind of lose your identity a little bit. You just become part of the band. I just needed to get away from it.
Playing a bad guy is always a freeing experience, because you don't have the same envelope of restrictions as you have playing a good guy. Good guys restrain themselves; they kind of have their moral fiber cut out for them in varying degrees.
I might have some sort of personality disorder. I might not have proper filters; it might be some kind of version of Asperger's meets Tourettes meets prose.
I think Chris Brown gets kind of dismissed as a gay writer, and I think Chris's books are really, really smart. I wish his books sold a little more widely.
My career is a burden, but I can't just fade out like a pathetic sore loser. More often than not, I'm just making a fool of myself for the hundredth time, and that wasn't part of the plan, initially. I'd be happier not having any kind of public presence whatsoever and just hiding behind the sleeves of the CD.
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
There are things God does for me daily, and it throws me into brain lock, because I know in my heart I don't deserve that kind of grace. I don't deserve that break.
There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.
I'd love to talk to Joaquin Phoenix because he's a very private guy. Also, he's creating a new kind of sexy leading man. To me, his face is new and might be legendary someday.
It is a tremendous honor to be named poet laureate, but one that I find humbling as well, because it's the kind of thing that makes me feel like - even as it's been bestowed upon me - I must continue to live up to what it means... Being the younger laureate in the age of social media is a new challenge.
I think that's one of the things that has always put me in kind of an odd niche. It's that all of my understanding of orchestral music is via film, not via classical music like it's supposed to be. To me it's the same, it doesn't make any difference.
People are dressing like stars, which is kind of fantastic.
I know with Gary Ross especially, he kind of gave me pointers here and there, but he kind of let me become firm in any way that I needed, and he just let me try things and to explore what I can do with my acting. So that was very helpful.
I go through the same kind of situations as other people. I have to give that to people, because people have this facade, this mirage, this mirror about me.
I have been able to tap into all the negative things that can happen to me throughout my life by numbing myself to the pain so to speak and kind of being able to vent it through my music.
Their lives have been largely defined by failure and you would think the prospect of marriage, which is supposed to be bountiful and hopeful, it's just really another kind of tangential thing in his life.
Those nations of artists, finding their own individualism, and kind of standing against the world: to me that's the ultimate nightmare. I want to get lost and diffused in the world.
It was a very cool thing to be a smart girl, as opposed to some other, different kind. And I think that made a great deal of difference to me growing up and in my life afterward.
There are different kinds of artists and very often, I'll be very frank with you, I wish I were a different kind.
I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.
I kind of waited for opportunities to be handed to me. I think I was lazy, and when things didn't go right, I just said, 'Oh well.'
I'm starting to play all the melodies with kind of keyboard sound but playing it from the bass guitar.
My kind of gay, meeting a woman and falling in love, is a different experience because it wasn't anything about 'Oh, I've always been gay and I'm breaking the chains.'
When I was 6 years old, I was in a rock band that was horrible called 'Dead End.' The name kind of described us. People liked us; we would go and perform at coffee houses and stuff.
In the beginning, New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.
Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form.
Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.
Acting itself is quite scary. Some people say that actors are show-offs, very egotistical and all that kind of stuff, but it is quite scary.
Food is an excellent way to do very elegant worldbuilding - the kind that can make a fictional world seem real, like it extends way past the edges of the frame.
I've always been kind of a hermit.
'Prima Donna' is my kind of love song to opera but it's not the full experience.
To do stories that I love, scripts that I love, and work with people who are passionate about them and passionate about projects - whether that's on stage or television or film, that's the kind of environment I want to work in.
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture: to reflect back its 'whatness,' refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness.
