I'm good at coming up with wacky characters and funny dialogue.
As a man of colour, I've spent my life asking people to see me for who I am. With Obama in the White House, it feels like people have finally caught up to where I've been most of my life.
You can get wrapped up in that megamerger mentality.
I'm really not good at anything else, so if I don't make it as a musician, I'll probably just end up living in the woods with a bunch of dogs.
I don't wash my hair very often. Once a week if I can. Because the more you wash it, you end up stripping out the natural oils. What I like to do is just rinse out the products that I've used during the week and then put leave-in conditioner in and let it dry naturally.
My grandmother was not a U.S. citizen. Growing up along the border, you see the real human side of immigration - not the picture often drawn by politicians far removed from the border.
We had a very normal, sort of ghetto, urban upbringing. My father was a bus driver and my mother was a seamstress and a substitute schoolteacher, off and on. So, that all adds up to no money.
In a series, you have the luxury of time to establish the character and build a rhythm. In a TV movie, you've got to come up with the rhythm now. Right now.
I wish that I could tell you that I have a season ski pass, but I have had to give that up since I've been in the Senate.
When I started acting, one of the first things I learned was - especially in Hollywood - was branding. I'm a tall guy. I'm like, 'Yeah, that's probably going to be my foot in the door,' because that's my impression on everybody. I'm an athletic guy, and I think, because I grew up disliking jocks so much, that became, like, the character for me.
I grew up in a farm town in Indiana. In the early years I played by myself, because there were no other musicians around.
I was brought up by my grandparents. So people go, 'Oh, what was that like? That must have been hard.' And you go: 'No, it wasn't.' It was just completely actually normal because the new norm seems to be whatever you make of it, doesn't it?
I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.
People probably have different philosophies about this, but I think that when you're first shaping the play and trying to find a character, the initial actors that develop it end up imprinting on it - you hear their voices; you hear their rhythms. You can't help but to begin to write toward them during the rehearsal process.
If you're a Daniel Bryan fan, I'm all for that. The more people Daniel Bryan will bring into arenas, the better. The more people I bring in, the better. But when I'm talkin', shut the hell up and let me talk.
Growing up, I was always prancing around and singing... and I just never really stopped.
'Wiseguy' for its time was good. It was really good. And it holds up still. But a lot of the restraints have been taken off now.
Amnesty International continues to report that extra judicial tortures and murders continue. This is not democracy that we are exporting to Mexico, and this is certainly not what the Mexican workers signed up for.
Some people can be president, some people can speak, some people, you know, anything that's positive, man - a dentist, a doctor. Just hang in there and never give up, and find out what is your talent. First you got to find your talent and just stick with your talent, and I guarantee you'll get there, man.
What we find is that if you have a goal that is very, very far out, and you approach it in little steps, you start to get there faster. Your mind opens up to the possibilities.
I'm not going to grouse and complain when there's nothing I can do about it. Once you've broken up with somebody, arguing with them is not going to bring them back. You may want to stop their Twitter account or call them up late at night, but they made the decision to leave.
After my first week of no wheat, my stomachaches were gone, my mucous cleared up, and I felt incredibly energetic. My headaches were also less frequent and less severe, and I had lost 3 pounds, most of it swelling and water weight my body had been holding onto as part of its response to the wheat products in my diet.
I think I was one of those kids that I might not fight you if you stepped on my shoes or stole my lunch money or that kind of stuff. But if you picked on a girl or something like that, that would cause me to rear up a little bit.
My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.
Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.
I grew up as a child living 'Red Dawn.' I was leaping out of spider holes, mowing down Russkies at the age of eight.
I think people assume that because I talk the way that I talk that I grew up with money, and then I've had to say, 'No, I grew up poor.' And then I was like, 'Why do I have to play this game where the only black experience that's authentic is the one where you grew up in poverty?' I mean, it's ridiculous.
I feel like I've grown up a bit. I'm a bit more confident, and I've been reading more, and I've had a little more time to myself. I went on this writing trip to gather my thoughts about where and who I am in this world, and why we're all here.
London cabs always dis me. I purposefully give them a good tip because I'm trying to straighten up the image where they don't want to pick up some shady-looking, bummy kid like myself. I'm trying to teach them that if you pick up the bummy-looking kid, you still get tipped, man. But they still jerk me around.
I think, my own personal view is there should be higher and higher levels of autonomy; government should not interfere in setting up colleges, in running colleges. The market, the society will decide which is a good university, which is not a good university, rather than government mandating.
The relentless invisible storm of radio signals and electronic particles, the hustle and bustle, and the billions of petrol explosions in the engine blocks of trucks and cars seem to churn up the molecules of life and heaven so violently that the beautiful fogs are unable to hold together like they once did.
Every day, I wake up and I say, 'Why... how... did I end up with 1.7 million Twitter followers?' It's freaky to me, every day, but that tells me that there's an appetite out there that had previously been underserved. There's an inner geek in us all, an inner bit of curiosity that people are discovering, and they like it.
Growing up in Houston, the music scene is super boring.
When writing 'Behind the Mask,' I opened up on every level. Hopefully, even the more knowledgeable fans, who really know me, will be surprised when they read it.
Nothing I do is didactic. I just want to hold up a mirror and say, 'This is who we are.'
I really love Scrabble. I played it with my mother growing up. We took it everywhere with us. We didn't know then about the two letter words. Who knew that AA, or more controversially, ZA, or QI were words? We were a games family generally.
