I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story.
The Gandhi family has a tradition of being good hosts. When you call upon them, they treat you with a lot of respect.
I look at the way that my kids interact with technology, and it becomes a mirror to the ways in which I myself interact with technology. I can see the ways in which that addiction and compulsion starts to settle in on them, and it's much more unnerving to see it in them than it is to experience it myself.
I listen to the people. That was a big reason for my life, maybe the main reason, I'm singing because I love it when people say to me, 'Thank you.' I thank them. It's a marriage.
I was always into music, but I wanted to do film when I was kid. I remember seeing big movies and wanting to do them. Then I was lucky enough to act in some of them, and I fell in love with it.
The goal for the Laureus Sport For Good Foundation is to give kids an opportunity to be involved in sports and hopefully learn some lessons along the way. We want to put them in a safe environment, help them if they need it and maybe they will get a scholarship to a school because of the skills that they learn. Sport is just a starting point.
I have to express sympathy from the bottom of my heart to those people who were taken as wartime comfort women. As a human being, I would like to express my sympathies, and also as prime minister of Japan I need to apologize to them.
I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.
On the way to work good-hearted young girls sometimes offer me their seats, which I accept and bless them in return, a transaction satisfying to all concerned.
I'm going into my first Olympics, whereas people I'm racing against are going into their third and fourth and probably last Olympics. So there's more pressure on them to perform. I've still got a whole future ahead of me. I am not even the Olympic champ.
The things you're passionate about and interested in, get experience with them by going deep on projects. I would encourage science projects, plays. Pursue science, math, writing, history - the 21st century demands a lot of cross-disciplinary thinking.
When I'm done with a book, I always give it to someone with expertise in the topic and tell them to flag all of my stupid mistakes.
I do feel my loved ones that have passed on; I feel them looking over my shoulder... So yeah, that's pretty profound, when you're not expecting it, you didn't particularly believe in it and then it just sort of happens too often to ignore.
If I see myself on a worst-dressed list - and I've been on many of them - I tend to have low self esteem for 24 hours. I just like to feel comfortable, and I like being excited about whatever it is I'm wearing. I hate subjecting myself to that kind of criticism!
Growing up in New York, I was sort of shocked when I realized that my children are Californians. They are 14 years old, and I explain to them frequently that they will never realize the glory of a snow day. You wake up and the world says, 'Oops, it's too much fun to go to school, you've got to stay home and deal with the snow!'
I love being the person my kids depend on to learn. Everything they learn, for the most part, comes from you - how they treat people, how they look at the world, how they process things. I love being that example for them, just like my parents were for me.
Nearly all of the major kinds of life, divisions of life, phyla of animals, occur in the sea. Only about half of them can make it to land or freshwater.
Romcoms are hard in a lot of ways: they're built to be buoyant. It's easy to demean them.
That whole business of having two homes, and that divided loyalty bind that kids get into. I mean, my parents were divorced - though I was adult - but I still grappled with being responsible to both of them.
Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.
I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.
Many people feel that we need the rule of law to eliminate our problems. But is it more laws that we need? We have many laws - thousands upon thousands of them - but they are constantly being broken.
Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.
There are some movie stars in Hollywood that are so scared, they also tell the reporter that they are recording them, in case there is something wrong with what they wrote about them in the papers.
I always said if it gets to a point where I really want a child, I would adopt; kids are amazing, so I'm getting the selfish stuff out of my system so when I have them I can say, 'Go, run. I have plenty of money, go play.'
I try to do things in one take, but doubling rhythm parts is always difficult, especially if you want things to cut the way I want them to cut.
It's helpful to have a handbag that's a bit crazy, or shoes that have kiwis on them or something, because it distracts.
I hated being in a convent. It's another form of power. Manipulation. Because who can say - one God for the whole universe? I think there must be millions of gods! And they're not all of them very nice.
All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.
In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for 'True Detective' was one of them.
I definitely support cop acting more than cops, but all of them ain't bad, just some of them.
People have seen me at my best, but I don't think most of them know everything that it took to get me to where I am today.
Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.
I'm never doing a new album. I'll probably do nothing but singles. I'm as good as anybody out there lyrically and conceptually and can go toe to toe with the best of them throughout history. But I don't know how much longer I'll be doing it. It's not really fun anymore.
Growing your own business is great. Watching your ideas come to life, taking care of new customers and watching them become repeat customers, and successfully building your team is a feeling that can't be matched.
Growing up I always used to shop in Oxfam. I'd find things for 50p and then take them home, cut them up and make them into something new.
