In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.
It's not like what I do, how I write, changes depending on the nature of the project. I give each story my all, regardless of if there are a few thousand people reading it or a few hundred thousand.
I face every project the same way - do it right and give 110%. 100% isn't good enough.
I'd love to have another film to go on to. I'm in the mood to work. But I have to be patient, you know, to find that particular kind of project. Occasionally I'll write one myself if I can summon up the energy.
It's kind of a rule of thumb for me to self-doubt going into any kind of project. I always think that I shouldn't be doing it and I don't know how to do it and I'm going to fail and that I fooled them. I always try to find a way out.
The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.
Increasingly, the real estate developers can't get bank loans for their project financing in China. They're now going into the Hong Kong market to raise money in the bond market at very, very high rates, as high as 15, 20 percent.
With a book, you're guaranteed the audience has a certain skill level and that the audience has to make an ongoing effort to consume this product and that the project is being consumed by just one person at a time. I really want to play to that strength because it's one of the few advantages books still have.
Everybody in the real world will agree - the moment a project is behind deadline, quality assurance tends to go out the window.
It quite often happens that they attach a name to a project and it doesn't get all the financing it needs.
I have all the patience in the world about Sirens. For me it's not a Grateful Dead project, it's a Me project.
I have three adopted children with Phil, and for years I was fighting in court with him over being able to see my kids. I was always going back and forth to California, going to court, and I was never able to get a project going.
The Blue Brain project expects to have a full human-scale simulation of the cerebral cortex by 2018. I think that's a little optimistic, actually, but I do make the case that by 2029 we will have very detailed models and simulations of all the different brain regions.
That's a great feeling to know that I'm going into a project that I have no idea what will become of that movie, but I really trust Ang Lee. And I really trusted Ron. It's just really nice to work with people that you feel that way about.
Ang Lee is very precise. He will show you everything, and will let you know what he is thinking about the whole project. There are a lot of rehearsals before shooting, and you already reach a certain standard. Then he will ask for more.
During my participation in the Manhattan Project and subsequent research at Los Alamos, encompassing a period of fifteen years, I worked in the company of perhaps the greatest collection of scientific talent the world has ever known.
I think there are lots of ways to make good work. You can throw big bucks at a project and make what some would call crap, or you can work very modestly with eloquently moving results.
I was in Beijing a month ago working on the smoke project in collaboration with an architect there, and I was asked very directly whether it was safe to breathe in the smoke. They did not have confidence in the museum not to use harmful smoke, and they certainly didn't have confidence that the city would protect them from harmful smoke.
I've had fun doing romantic comedies, but I just can't anymore. There's nothing fulfilling creatively, there's nowhere to grow, nothing to learn from it or for yourself. I'd rather just be home with my family or write music until that special project comes my way.
With anything I do, it's hard to categorize it. With any project, I just go in and blindly start writing songs and then find out which way we want to go with it.
But I also think that the more you reason collectively about what the project should be at the beginning of the process, the more you can improvise later.
You know, I don't really do that much looking inside me when I'm working on a project. Whatever I am becomes what that film is. But I change; you change.
For each project I do, I try to surprise myself, do the unexpected, and change my own status quo. From the One Laptop Per Child, the Herman Miller Sayl, or the latest Movado watch collection, there is always an insecurity about being able to do something important. I think each of those projects makes me feel like we have progressed.
I feel like - like Netflix is great if you've got a project ready to launch itself into the world rapidly.
I actually auditioned for 'Nashville' while shooting on another project located in Boston. I had a couple weeks off from shooting and decided to go back to L.A. While I was there, my manager suggested I go in for the role on 'Nashville.'
User-centered design means working with your users all throughout the project.
Recovery is an ongoing project that is really discrete from everything else in my life. It allows me to be an agent, allows me to write, allows me to be married, allows me to be part of a family. The writing is not a support beam of recovery but a happy consequence of it.
Before I joined the project most of the English people with whom I had made personal contacts were left wing and affected to some degree or other by the same kind of philosophy.
I feel very, very lucky to have been involved with a project that's gone on as long as 'The Closer' has. You really don't get to do that in this profession.
The 'Total Information Awareness' project is truly diabolical - mostly because of the legal changes which have made it possible in the first place. As a consequence of the Patriot Act, government now has access to all sorts of private and commercial databases that were previously off limits.
Half-jokingly, I asked what was wrong with me. So we made a deal: I would run his biological research provided I had a free hand to run my new project.
Our purpose in this project is to begin to turn that fear of cancer, actually America's greatest fear, into a future, not only free of fear, but full of hope.
State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.
So everything turned out fine, and we were given the opportunity to go to Washington and be briefed on the project of man in space, and given the opportunity to choose whether we wanted to get involved or not.
I don't think any actor has the luxury of knowing exactly what scripts are going to turn out well and what ones aren't. It would be wonderful to have that particular skill, and maybe people like Tom Cruise have it more than most, but you go into each project hoping that a good, if not great, film will come out the other end.
There are good reasons why we don't want everyone to learn nuclear physics, medicine or how financial markets work. Our entire modern project has been about delegating power over us to skilled people who want to do the work and be rewarded accordingly.
