In a lot of the really impoverished areas of Johannesburg you see these packets of cheesy puffs which are like 6 feet long and the width of a basketball, and they're transparent and they have like 10,000 cheesy puffs in them, and you can buy that for like 50 cents. It's kind of a weird treat that you'd see people having in the townships.
Life is a story. You and I are telling stories; they may suck, but we are telling stories. And we tell stories about the things that we want. So you go through your bank account, and those are things you have told stories about.
When it comes to cooking pasta, the first essential is to make sure you have a big enough pot: it needs room to roll in the water while cooking.
With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.
I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to tell a story. I find it in Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and David Foster Wallace.
I've always thought my soundtracks do pretty good, because they're basically professional equivalents of a mix tape I'd make for you at home.
I don't think there was a thunderclap or a divine spark that suddenly made one species smart. You can see, in our ancestors, there was a gradual expansion of the brain; there was an expansion of the complexity of tools.
There is a guilty pleasure in being rude and knowing that it's acting rather than you. But you get the same release as if you were being rude in life.
You are never too young to learn, never too old to change.
Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.
You can't have a United States if you are telling some folks that they can't get on the train. There is a cracking point where a society collapses.
It ended up being a very good thing, because they finally started writing for the character, and I realized that you have to go to work with a purpose. I learned from the experience and then moved on.
If you sell a physical product, you have a lot of Q4 upside and unpredictability, but now you have to manage your cash to get to Q4 so that you can invest in building inventory to over-perform.
You don't see too many atheists on the deathbed. They all start cramming then.
Sometimes the transition from being in control of your life to having absolutely no control is swift, but other times it is so gradual that you wonder exactly when it truly began.
I've said before, if you're going to earnestly sing a song around a campfire, you'd better be a Muppet!
Like a layer on a pearl, you can't specifically identify the irritant, the moment of the irritant, but at the end of the day, you know you have a pearl.
When you are making a movie, there are a zillion cooks in the kitchen, and you don't always get what you want to do. The story can always go in a different direction than what you would like. You compromise, and there is dealing and bickering.
It's very difficult for me to say 'I love you' but to sing 'I love you' for me is easier.
One of the difficulties you run into is that acting and celebrity are so closely intertwined. People make careers out of being charismatic personalities. It's one of those things that people have come to expect from actors. Personalities that don't change from role to role. I don't want it that way.
Remember that bodily exercise, when it is well ordered, as I have said, is also prayer by means of which you can please God our Lord.
Cervical cancer doesn't discriminate by how much money you have. The disease affects so many - it's frightening.
The more money you spend, the more you need to make back, and the more pressure there is to appeal to everyone - which to the studio means that the specificity and uniqueness must be watered down. But I think mass audiences like things that are more specific and tend to have a voice, like 'Napoleon Dynamite' or 'Superbad.'
When you have an attorney giving you advice, it would be nice to know what their financial relationship is to the advice.
In football, like in life, you must learn to play within the rules of the game.
I don't worry about whether I'm making a masterpiece, because I know that if you get just one of those in a lifetime, you should get down on your knees and say 'Thank you!'
Every audition, I walk out the door and throw the sides away immediately. You did it, now go home. And to me, that's kind of a baptism. If they call you, they call you. And if they don't, it's fine.
When I walked out on the mound, I felt enclosed. You see, I'd been used to playing on pastures, where when somebody hit a ball you had to stop it from rolling. Well, this field had fences around it.
If we chew every morsel of our food, in that way we become grateful, and when you are grateful, you are happy.
I have a nice little office, with a nice little window in it, but I do basically spend huge amounts of time in what you could consider solitary confinement.
Everything you see on screen is real. By doing what we do, there's naturally going to be a lot of grimacing. And whimpering.
I've had that experience many, many, times - when you don't get roles. I'd developed a good muscle for shaking it off. I buy myself a present whenever I don't get a role that I really wanted. You get bummed out, and then you go, 'Oh! Now I get to go buy a present for myself.' That kind of helps.
In England, you feel like a member of the revolutionary guard the minute you even mention race. But I do think that the OscarsSoWhite phenomenon will have to reflect back on England. What people are essentially saying is that they want to see more diverse stories. It's not about putting three black people in the back of the shot.
When you do anything too long, you either wear it out or lose interest.
Slavery was a violent, brutal, immoral system, and in accurately depicting how it worked, you have to include that, obviously. Or else you are lying.
Nothing you do particularly matters. But I'm not sure that's a great excuse for doing it poorly.
