I was the most important person of the world, and people like the Pope would be just like enemies, who would try to put me down in some way or another, or the president. People are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering.
There are people who can sit down and write a song about any given subject, and they can do it really, really well.
Contrary to popular mythology, the best and most durable relationships are based not on vulnerability or passion but on a conjugation of positive attributes, a meeting of mind, body and soul that is all the more powerful as it is not weighed down with neediness and unreasonable expectation.
I'd love to act more. I've had to turn down multiple movies because I was on tour, but it's encouraging to know that someday there might be the right role, the right timing. And I've been writing a lot of music, so hopefully very soon I'll have recorded a project of my own. I also want to get a boat and open a restaurant.
I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.
When you lose a loved one, you come to these crossroads. You can take the path that leads you down the aisle of sadness, or you can say, 'I'm never going to let this person's memory die. I'm going to make sure everything they worked for continues.'
I've turned down projects based on raunchiness before.
I once did a film in which I was being chased by wolves. I had a scene where the Alpha of the pack leapt on the hood of my car and stared me down through the windshield. I will never forget staring into those eyes; this wasn't a dog - not even a tough, bad-ass dog - no, this was a wolf.
I suppose I've always done my share of crying, especially when there's no other way to contain my feelings. I know that men ain't supposed to cry, but I think that's wrong. Crying's always been a way for me to get things out which are buried deep, deep down. When I sing, I often cry. Crying is feeling, and feeling is being human. Oh yes, I cry.
I used to look down on the world for being corrupt, but now I adore it for the utter magnificence of that corruption.
McEnroe has got to sit down and work out where he stands.
So when you enjoy the beats, the rock music - maybe even toned down with an orchestra - you are enjoying the spirit of the black race. And that's what I emphasize to the students.
Capote wrote every day. He said that's the only way, you have to sit down every day and do it.
To be able to walk down the street and have people stop you, not just because they recognize you, but because you somehow personally touched them, it's amazing.
If you're raised Methodist, Catholicism is a bit of a workout. It's sort of like you're up, you're down, you're up, you're down. It's a continual hokey-pokey.
I even scored Monaco's goal too. Please, put it down as an own goal for me!
I'm well-travelled so I can see places coming up. I went to St. Croix in the West Indies at Christmas and it had been hit by a really bad tornado. Values there have gone down but I guarantee they will be up again in eight years. So I'll get in now while it's cheap as chips.
I'm carded for R-rated movies. And I get talked down to a lot. When I try to go rent a car or buy an airplane ticket or other stuff adults do, I get 'Okaaaaaay, honey.' I remember when I was 18, getting crayons in a restaurant.
I'm not a writer that writes every day. I just kind of have ideas. I jot them down when I have them, and when I have enough, I just start. And for me, I start more around noon, and I'm all about feeling. Once there's a theme, I can't not write.
So, you can set up an orchestra down this end of the railway station playing one particular area, and simultaneously at the other end something completely different going on. And in the middle they meet, or not, depending.
Working on 'Nightmare Before Christmas,' I had endless arguments, like the studio saying, 'You can't have a main character that's got no eyeballs!' 'How is anybody going to feel for somebody with just eyesockets?' You know? So, it's those kind of things that really wear you down.
I just got tired of being sick and tired and feeling down. Unfortunately, you don't realize this until you're getting sober but the reason why you're depressed all the time is it's the drugs that are depressing you.
I never believed that U2 wanted to save the whales. I don't believe that The Beastie Boys are ready to lay it down for Tibet.
When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history.
They all went down in droves because just scenes of palm trees and beaches can get pretty boring.
Actors do like watching girls parade down the runway for some reason.
I broke down while at Oxford, was rejected by a record number of medical tribunals during the War, and finally got permission to leave Oxford and do civilian work till the War ended.
They have what you call a black night where they have black people come in for just one night only to watch comedy, and you get all your local drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes, all of them come in, sit down, and listen to you tell jokes. They the hardest people to make laugh.
You can feel as brave as Columbus starting for the unknown the first time you enter a Chinese lane full of boys laughing at you, or when you risk climbing down in a Tibetan pub for a meal of rotten meat.
Judges who take the law into their own hands, who make up constitutional 'rights' in order to strike down laws they oppose, undermine the people's right to have their values shape public policy and define the culture.
I can sit in my room and write a song that I think might be a hit. I can sort of make myself do that, and then I'll play it to a friend, and they'll say, 'Oh, that's nice.' But when something happens to me, and I sit down and write a song to get rid of my emotions, they'll turn around and say, 'Wow, that's great.'
We take nothing to the grave with us, but a good or evil conscience... It is true, terrors of conscience cast us down; and yet without terrors of conscience we cannot be raised up again.
All nuclear weapon states should now recognize that this is so, and declare - in Treaty form - that they will never be the first to use nuclear weapons. This would open the way to the gradual, mutual reduction of nuclear arsenals, down to zero.
If you write something down on paper, it becomes an actual goal. Before you write it down, it's a thought, a dream that may or may not get done.
It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script; I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.
