I'm not someone who can lie on a beach and do nothing. I am not sure what you are supposed to do, so I get bored. I prefer to have a purpose, such as going to Alaska to see orca whales.
There's really only three things you can write music about: girls, cars and surfing.
This whole idea of visibility by the public creates a pretty powerful lever. In the new transparency era, you are able to make change you would otherwise have difficulty making. It's no longer possible for somebody just to bury the problem. It's the reason why things like WikiLeaks are important.
In a way, novel writing is such a permanently student lifestyle. When it comes to movies, and you have to go to these meetings and try and impress people and get money out of them, I feel as though I'm playacting at being somebody who's grown up.
I had lots of trouble in school as a child, and I lost confidence. Teachers thought I was stupid. I learned to read very late, when I was 11. Dyslexia wasn't recognized then, and the assumption was you were incapable of thinking.
Makeup can help you capture a moment.
The audition process for 'Are You There, Chelsea?' was overwhelming and exciting. It was my first pilot season and one of the first pilots I auditioned for.
Magic to me is you make a movie and it's all great and it clicks, and at the end of the day you feel like you're having an experience that is positive and that you're learning from.
It's pretty funny, just driving by in a cab, and you see a huge billboard of yourself on the side of a hotel, like a 100-by-100 poster hanging up.
Here's a list of some of the folks who have written Swamp Thing over the years: Alan Moore, Len Wein, Scott Snyder, Brian K Vaughan, Joshua Dysart, Rick Veitch, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar. That's not even a full list, but you see my point - ol' Swampy has had some seriously brilliant people behind the keyboard in his time.
All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.
In order to succeed... you have to put a stake in the ground.
We run courses for government school teachers on Sundays. These teachers pay for their own food and stay; the kind of commitment you find in these people is remarkable.
I love theatre, and you learn too much as an actor and enjoy too much of it not to want to go back a lot.
Gymnastics should be popular everywhere; you just need the right person to start the right programme.
You can work really hard on your physicality, on your craft, on the films you do. You can choose the best of directors, the best of productions, get the best technicians, you can put your entire body and soul into the making of a film, but at the end of the day, it all depends on the mood of that one audience member that goes into that theater.
This is the problem with the leaking. This is actually a terrible thing. Let's say I'm firing Michael Short today. The fact that you guys know about it before he does really upsets me as a human being and as a Roman Catholic.
I once got a letter from a woman who told me she was 90. She said if she were 30 years younger, I would have had to watch out. I guess 60 seems really young when you're 90. She said she would eat me with a spoon.
Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, 'Children's Letters to God.' You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.'
It's not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
Every cell in our body, whether it's a bacterial cell or a human cell, has a genome. You can extract that genome - it's kind of like a linear tape - and you can read it by a variety of methods. Similarly, like a string of letters that you can read, you can also change it. You can write, you can edit it, and then you can put it back in the cell.
I know it's so 'in' to be blase, but that's not going to get you anywhere.
Don't let anyone tell you there's only one way to write.
When I'm interviewing somebody, I take notes with a Bic Cristal, the classic black-cap, clear-body, medium-weight pen. It works on many levels: You can chew the cap, and if you're really bored, you can bite the end off the back.
There's a lot of noise in the world. And one of the beautiful things about doing theater and film is the absence of that noise or, perhaps, the adding of that noise where it's helpful in telling the story. I'm always trying to get rid of that noise. The more you do it, the better you get.
The key thing is you can be the only person, your own critic.
It's always disappointing when your work is not received as you hope it would be.
If someone said, 'You've got to eat your next two meals at American fast-food restaurants,' I would do one meal at Chipotle and one meal at Popeyes fried chicken.
That would really be my fantasy - maybe just do three shows a year and each year in a different city, just singing for the people who really want to see it, and then just write for other people. I do love to sing, but I'm just as happy singing in the bathtub, you know?
If you've got information about an opponent running against you, wouldn't you want that information - to vet it, to see if it's real information, and to use it accordingly?
If you're going to play the bargaining game, you just need to make the other side mad. You want them to get a little annoyed. Then you know that you've come in with a good price.
I have an Indian father, and when you grow up in a house with an Indian father, culturally, that's what becomes dominant in the house. So that's the tradition we grew up with.
Connecting with Canadians isn't about what you say, it's about what you're listening to. It's about what you understand.
You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.
You know, I stopped being competitive after I played football.
When we are out on the road, running up and down the road playing shows, you have to be not only a member of a band but, especially with Lynyrd Skynyrd, you have to be a part of the Skynyrd nation. You have to be a part of the family.
