Ireland and America, music-wise, are very closely related. The Irish came over with their fiddles in hand, and you can hear it in the bluegrass and rockabilly. I love it when music from different countries combine.
I do limit my exposure to the public. You only have so much time.
The Olympics meant everything to me. Going through them is like nothing else you will ever experience. For those few weeks, you are in another world. At that point, I couldn't see how there could ever be anything better.
Models are like athletes: You burn hard and fast.
If you look at all those terrorist groups - I'm talking, going back, Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, ISIS - they're all proxy armies in an Islamic civil war.
The difference between you and the funny person on TV is that they acted on their ideas.
I've always known that beauty is also from the inside - if you're happy, that will shine through - I've always believed that, but since I've started having a family, I became even more happy, and I think it even shows more. I've also become more successful since I've become a mother.
Fanboys are a creator's blessing and curse. If a fanboy likes you, they love you. Obsessively. If you cross them with some plot point or story direction they reject, expect to be wholly and continually eviscerated across the Internet.
When you're riding with your mom, and you're a kid, you'd listen to 'Dear Mama' and the radio friendly records. I used to sneak and listen to Too $hort.
In a silent film, you speak but the audience does not hear you.
And then they sign an affidavit swearing that she's not in a vegetative stage. I'll tell you. That's a doctor you really want; they can look at a picture and make a diagnosis.
I wanted contemporary music to be treated the same as the traditional repertoire - performed regularly by people who knew each other and the music. That is the way you convince an audience.
If you go through some big corporate change, it's just not going to be the same. If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different; if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don't sell because there's inevitably going to be some change.
When a movie opened - if you lived in New York, you would see it at Radio City Music Hall where it would play a couple of weeks, and then you moved on to the next movie. Now you can see it the rest of your life - it's going to be on Netflix and DVD.
The more Mommy blogs going nuclear over playground etiquette I read and birthday parties of glazed adults munching cupcakes like demoralized zombies I attend, I realize this is what my friends who conceived before me meant by, 'You just won't care.'
Come on... when you're running, if you see you're going to win, you're going to celebrate.
I remember, when I was growing up in Baltimore, we'd get on a streetcar and go down to see the Orioles, and for a couple of bucks, you could get a pretty good seat. Kids can't do that anymore. So I think that changes the whole nature of sports.
I was born in Iran, which has a predominantly Muslim population, and I have relatives who are devout Muslims, so I know what it means to be judged based on your appearance and what you're wearing. But your ethnicity and your clothing do not define who you are.
With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?'
How many people do you know who've had their dream come true? You're looking at one.
If you are in this country illegally, stealing a job from an American citizen, I'm going to do all I can to put an American citizen in that job and not somebody that has crossed our border, come into the country and violated our laws.
When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.
Leave America and you'll find that the consumers in many other countries enjoy watching advertising. Not because the products are better, but because the ads are produced to be entertaining. Sometimes they are funny. Sometimes they are dramatic. Sometimes they are just beautiful.
If you went for a job interview in a Glasgow law firm, they used to ask you what school you went to. And that was a way of finding out what religion you were.
I'm from Texas. You would think my biggest draw would be in that state. But my biggest draw is Pennsylvania.
If you have children, you cannot feed them forever with flags for breakfast and cartridges for lunch. You need something more substantial. Unless you educate your children and spend less money on conflicts, unless you develop your science, technology and industry, you don't have a future.
As my friends will tell you, I am a superior agonizer. Believe me, you do not want me in the cockpit of an airliner. But in my defense, choosing an idea is also a high-stakes affair.
Spike Lee gave me the greatest reaction to the fact that I was this athlete-meets-artist, because I think he saw that I was different. I learned that oftentimes, Spike directs in a sense that he might just stare at you and look at you in a telepathic way of communicating.
You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.
You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.
Once you see the entertainment world from both sides, you really get a greater understanding of how it all operates. As an actor going into screenwriting, I was able to understand what type of dialogue feels natural and what an actor could actually say.
When you make music, you're forming these invisible vibrations in the air into different shapes and consistencies and speeds in order to create music, and understanding how the math of that works just gives you more colors to paint with, and allows you to get to what you want quicker.
Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible.
Because I'm so in the eye of the hurricane, I don't have a really good perception of what's happening. I'm in a room talking to people, and that's all I know. But sometimes I go out of these rooms - I live in L.A., and every now and then, maybe twice a week, I'll be somewhere, and someone will say, 'Hey, are you the guy that made Moonlight?'
You really have to stay true to yourself, as cheesy as that sounds. And you cannot take no for an answer, and you have to dream big. I think that's the greatest thing my family ever taught me: if you're going to dream, you have to dream so big.
I think that style, taste, and choices in general are forged by everything that surrounds you - everything you see, taste, touch, smell and hear. So of course, my family has influenced me as a person and in my own style, but so have all the experiences that I went through as an individual.
