As you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore.
When you're on a submarine you're usually underwater for months at a time, and you don't get to Skype or make phone calls. When you get messages, they're maybe two sentences. They're very short.
When you look at someone good like J.J. Abrams who gives you the spectacle and great action set pieces but also gives you character and great story and plotting and narrative, I think it's my job - and my intention - to do both.
I want girls to know that equality exists in this world. You can do anything you want.
Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.
As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script. I'm not the world's best writer or the world's best actor, but I can do that thing where I can fix - or ruin - fix-slash-ruin, add quirk, add value.
My hope for AI and Facebook in the next decade is you can sit down and tell Facebook, 'This is what I want to hear about today.' Like, I'm having a bad day; I want to hear some good news. If we make our products better, more people will use it - people use it more. It's fairly easy to understand.
For me it's hard, especially being a young African-American woman. My dad doesn't look like what you might call the 'safe' African-American male that America would accept, if you know what I mean.
It's one of those things where people tell you that when you have kids it will change your perspective on life, and you're like, 'Yea, yea,' but then you really understand it when it happens to you.
Hip-hop is when you have crowd participation; when you chant at the audience and they chant back at you; when you wave your hands in the air like you just don't care; or some breakdancing. Everything today is just low-beat, real bass-y, bass-y, good rap records.
I've always been very cautious with what I do. You know, that started at a young age. I always had the approach or the mentality I never wanted to embarrass my parents.
If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results.
Just because you put higher-octane gasoline in your car doesn't mean you can break the speed limit. The speed limit's still 65.
Maybe by making people feel uncomfortable, I tap into that uncanny quality that is a part of the scariest, weirdest things that you remember happening to you when you were a kid.
No day-to-day mishaps or indignities can really compromise your sense of self after you've survived a deep tragedy.
If you look at an old piece of sheet music, there's all kinds of text on it, there are ads, there are proclamations of the greatest songs' success, there's artwork. So there is a tactile, physical experience of learning the song and the way it's notated.
I think if you don't trust in yourself, it helps to trust in something else.
A lot of people are scared of experimentation because they think you have to be scientists, or they're also scared of it because it means that you have to admit that you don't know the answer. A lot of people like to assume they know the solution to a problem when they don't.
Unless you have a sense of values that's shared by people and turns them loose to do certain things on their own within those sets of values, the organization, whether a nation or corporation or citizen group, just doesn't work very well.
If you say you are the Safe Food Foundation, that means you're implying that your food is safer or that every other bit of food that we're eating is not safe. If they were a really honest foundation, they would call themselves the anti-GM foundation.
I think you can overthink dealing with fame. To an extent, you've got to put yourself out there, but I feel like your work should really speak for itself, and I don't feel the need to go and make everyone like me because, to be honest, I'm not looking to be friends with the world. I'd much rather people watch the things that I'm in.
Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president.
You have a shelf-life on TV.
Writing on your own is, in a way, a very lonely profession. There's no one there to help you.
I'm a great believer that actors are very similar to session musicians. You wouldn't ask a session musician, 'How do you play jazz,' and then, 'How do you play classical?' They just do it, because if they don't do it, they don't eat.
When I feel my blood sugar getting off, I drink a glass of kale juice. It's so disgusting you don't want to eat anything!
When you feel good, you look good. And vice versa: When you look good, you feel good.
The really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it. Because what you can measure in virtuality is everything. Every single thing that every single person who's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured.
I don't care what town you're born in, what city, what country. If you're a child, you are curious about your environment. You're overturning rocks. You're plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you're doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.
For trance music to be good, it has to sneak up on you.
The more you do, the more you think, the better you get.
If you're a movie star, you get the girl, you lose the girl, and then you get her back. But if you're a character like me, you lose the girl, then you get another one, then you get another one, then you lose them all, then you lose your life.
In L.A., we have a saying - 'What do you do?' It's less of a question and more of a self-defense mechanism for wayward screenwriters looking to slip you a first draft, or the occasional actor looking to get in on the latest shoot. But I hate the question because of my own answer - I write about games.
The important thing, once you get 'em laughing, is to keep 'em laughing until you're through. With a 90-minute feature, you've got to stop the laughter and then pick it up again, which is tough.
I am perfectly capable of writing things about myself that one doesn't discuss in polite company, but I was raised by people who said you don't discuss politics, you don't discuss religion, and you certainly don't discuss people's sex lives.
Today is the day to break free from the prison of the person you know yourself to be and step into a self you have yet to know. Will it be comfortable? No, but do it anyway.
