I grew up in a mostly Buddhist environment.
While MIT and the University of Chicago duke it out for the title of nerdiest school, James Franco and Renee Zellweger show up at Harvard to party. Somehow, miracle of miracles, Harvard is 'cool.'
Everything is a learning process: any time you fall over, it's just teaching you to stand up the next time.
The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
The theory that if wages go up, employment goes down isn't a physical law like F=MA. It's a moral law, like 'Bedtime is 9:00 P.M.'
I played in Joe Louis in a playoff game. I played there when the roof caved in for half a season. The facility is great for basketball because it goes straight up, so you feel like the fans are on top of you.
I fed my yak on my spare Cadbury chocolate 21,0000ft up Everest. It was a blonde, very sweet female yak. I made it my pet after that.
I grew up in East Germany, and we were short on technology. So my father was really proud to be the owner of a turntable.
I remember growing up knowing I wanted to be on the stage. I wanted to get to London as soon as possible and start auditioning for theater.
At the start of my career, when I used to toss and turn at night, I was fighting that feeling and wanting to go to sleep. Now I know that's normal, so I'll just get up and watch TV or something. I know it's just my subconscious mind getting ready for a game.
Of course, I grew up hearing Latin music but, to be honest, aside from my personal circumstances, like most kids I wanted to rebel against what I considered to be such old fashioned fare.
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
That's maybe the most important thing each generation does, is to break a lot of rules and make up their own way of doing things.
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.
Easier to climb up, than to just hang on.
You have kids growing up in some of the worst circumstances financially, living in some of the worst ghettos, and they succeed. They succeed because an adult figure, typically a mother, maybe a grandmother, nourishes the kid, supports the kid, protects the kid, encourages the kid to succeed. It's as if the environment never happened.
I actually wanted to become a model agent, and went into what ended up becoming my first agency for a job interview. They ended up suggesting I model instead. I guess I sort of fell into it.
Unless you're the director on the movie, or putting up the money for the movie, you really don't have a lot of control.
Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.
Whatever's going on in my life shows up in the writing room.
You have to stand up for some things in this world.
When I was young, I used to hear people say, 'He's a golden boy. Look at that guy. Can you imagine what he's going to be like when he grows up?' Well, I unfortunately bought into that. And I hadn't even found myself. Quite honestly, I was running from myself. But I knew how to work Top 40 radio.
I don't want to go out there and show up. I hate losing. Everybody hates losing. But I hate losing.
I don't think that VR is going to lead to humanity being enslaved in the matrix or letting the world crumble around us. I think it's going to end up being a great technology that brings closer people together, that allows for better communication, that reduces a lot of environmental waste that we're currently doing in the real world.
Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.
My mother was from West Bromwich; my grandfather was Pakistani. I had an aunt who started trying to trace the family tree and stopped when she saw what turned up.
I was getting to bed about 10 P.M. so wound up and not getting to sleep by 11, and because I was putting the prosthetics on for five hours, I had to be up at 3 in the morning.
I went to my friend's house one day, and he had an electric guitar he had just bought with a tiny little amp. I turned the volume up to 10 and I hit one chord, and I said, I'm in love.
Narrative is so rich; it's given up so much.
Growing up in eastern Kentucky like I did, I'm used to having a few guns around to protect me.
Throughout my life, my mom has been the person that I've always looked up to.
I'd hate to be a teetotaler. Imagine getting up in the morning and knowing that's as good as you're going to feel all day.
As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.
We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room.
Charles Blow's memoir 'Fire Shut Up in My Bones' was a breathtaking piece of writing.
I grew up in the kitchen, mostly with my grandfather, my mother and my aunt Raffy.
