When I was growing up, I did go to the arcade. We had a neighborhood arcade, and my friends and I would go fairly regularly.
'La La Land' is about the city I live in. It's about the music that I grew up playing; it's about movies that I grew up watching. Even the big spectacle of the movie feels private to me in that way.
It's always a good idea to go up for the male roles. You go up against a bunch of beefy guys, and the casting director then feels smart for taking you on, like he's the one who thought outside the box.
I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.
Audiences make their minds up about people they see on screen, just like they do in real life. That's what fascinates me in film. You see a character and have to think: is this person different to what I assumed he was when I first saw him?
Never let up. The more you can win by, the more doubts you put in the other players' minds the next time out.
People really want to set up these rivalries because there's a lot of vampire books out there. People want to believe we're all fierce rivals, and really there's just so much camaraderie with authors. Everyone kind of boosts each other.
When life knocks you down, keep getting up.
Get your work in, do what you need do, and get back up top. I'm a little bit behind the curve as far as not really having a spring training, so you're trying to get your work in, trying to work on things, and at the same time, you're also going out there trying to be competitive.
An artist or a creative person of any kind goes about their work because it's their path, it's what excites them, it's what aligns their soul with who they truly are, who they showed up to be.
Hair is an issue for most women, and after washing, blow-drying, flat-ironing, curling, braiding, twisting and spending the time and money on it, who wants to mess it up by sweating and having to do it all over again?
I did not grow up in a cosmopolitan environment. I grew up in a little town in the middle of nowhere, pre-Internet, pre-college radio.
I am definitely of the method-acting school. Everything to me is about sound. I don't dress up in period costumes or anything like that. I'm very aural. When I'm working, I try to soak up the sounds of an era.
I think it's because in America you always get the sense that if you fail, you can just pack up your things and go somewhere else and try again. But in England, it's so geographically small that if somebody succeeds here, it reduces your chances of succeeding.
Just because we finally have a Latino family on TV doesn't mean we're up there to lecture people about what it means to be Latino.
I always look at these superhero films, and I see people hurdling towards at a hundred miles per hour, and then they get up, shake their head, and charge back at a hundred miles per hour. Nobody seems to really get injured or hurt. I don't find any threat in that. There is no tension in that whatsoever.
The simplest way to remove carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is to grow plants - preferably trees, since they tie up more of the gas in cellulose, meaning it will not return to the air within a season or two. Plants build themselves out of air and water, taking only a tiny fraction of their mass from the soil.
I grew up in North Yorkshire, but now London is home.
When I read 'Rocky V,' it was a terrific story, a great script. Rocky died at the end. He has this devastating fight with Tommy Gunn, ends up in an ambulance with his head in Adrian's lap, and by the time they get to the hospital, he's dead.
Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn't smooth. You'll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don't believe in your mission, giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don't give up.
I been trying to clean up my act with my children for a long time. And I pretty much got them all talking to me now. And they accept me as a humanoid again.
Why can't I ever play a nice, normal, salt-of-the-earth type? Is there something I should know? It's fun to play villains and character roles, of course - but I'm sure it's also fun to be a really big star and play the lead in everything, where all you have to do is show up and not blink.
Dogs are not people. Be leery of any woman who refers to her dogs as her 'kids,' because you'll only end up paying for their schooling.
I usually get up between 5:30 and 6. The good news in Bentonville, Arkansas, is I can be in the office seven minutes later. I like to get in, work on e-mails and catch up.
When I grew up, we didn't have a TV, and I think more families today have ambitions of getting out of their environment, such as sending their children to university.
I picked up the guitar very late, in a very pagan way - I didn't know how to play, but I knew I had to. I drew and I had a diary, but it wasn't enough; I needed to express more. As soon as I learned two notes, I started to tell a story, which is why, I guess, my music resembles blues or folk.
Being in this fine mood, I spoke to a little boy, whom I saw playing alone in the road, asking him what he was going to be when he grew up. Of course I expected to hear him say a sailor, a soldier, a hunter, or something else that seems heroic to childhood, and I was very much surprised when he answered innocently, 'A man.'
Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?'
And I have to say, what motivates me every day and I know my Democratic colleagues is to remember that every day 14,000 people get up in the morning with insurance that go to bed at night without it and most of them because they lost their job.
I'm very hopeful that I'm not the only one who's willing to pick up the baton of freedom, because freedom is not free, and we must fight for it every day. Every one of us must fight for it, because we're fighting for our children and the next generation.
When I know what the character I'm supposed to play wants in general terms, and when I know what did the other characters want to do, that's when all these wills collide and the emotions show up.
I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.
The thing to do with mutual funds is to buy a couple of decent ones, set up an investment plan and then never, ever think about them again, except maybe once a quarter or so when you take a peek at your statements to make sure that you have not accidentally been buying the Fidelity Peace-in-the-Middle-East fund.
A lot of times, I faced bullies - or the 'big dogs' at school. What I wanted 'Red Rising' to be is not necessarily an indictment on bullies, but it reflects my experiences and attitudes that I had with bullies growing up.
We were raised with that discussion about violence and non-violence, and we all pretty much came up on the side of non-violence. That became my foundation with politics and my livelihood.
I think when you marry up like I did and Mitt Romney did, your wife says a lot about who you are and I think she humanizes him and brings a different vision of who Mitt Romney is.
