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.
Kids are born curious about the world. What adults primarily do in the presence of kids is unwittingly thwart the curiosity of children.
Science means constantly walking a tightrope between blind faith and curiosity; between expertise and creativity; between bias and openness; between experience and epiphany; between ambition and passion; and between arrogance and conviction - in short, between an old today and a new tomorrow.
I had this unusual mix of curiosity, the ability to write in ways people understood, and when I appeared, viewers seemed to trust me to get them through some cataclysmic changes.
The older I get, the more my curiosity grows, and every book I write is a new exploration.
What really matters is your movies and how good a person you are. Otherwise, tabloids and news channels writing about you only builds your curiosity and stardom and propels you to reach wider places.
I've always been an engineer devoted to the potential of advanced technologies. Like most engineers, I have a keen sense of curiosity and a deep desire to learn. Garmin was my first entrepreneurial endeavour, and it has been an incredible journey.
When Twitter made its way to my radar I looked at it as a curiosity, then started experimenting. I approached that as a place to be less formal and more off-the-cuff, honest and 'human.'
My parents lived a modest life, and their main concern was the education of their children. My father was a self-taught man but had a great intellectual curiosity, not only for biblical and talmudic texts, but also for philosophy, psychoanalysis and history.
Under no condition can you teach curiosity.
I like a man who has a great curiosity and sense of adventure because that's the way I am. He has to have a willingness to be vulnerable and a willingness to see where the road takes us. And I want a man who is romantic.
I think connecting to a character is like connecting to any human being - either you like them or you don't. You might not be able to list the reasons why you love your best friend or what attracted you to them; it's just something that you feel - a connection, an understanding, or a curiosity that makes you want to get to know them.
Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!
People ask me, 'Don't you ever run out of ideas?' Well, on the first place, I don't use ideas. Every time I have an idea, it's too limiting and usually turns out to be a disappointment. But I haven't run out of curiosity.
When starting a project, your influences are the things around you. It doesn't mean you have to sound like it or look like it or anything. It's just something new, and your curiosity becomes enthralled by it.