Obviously, movies and music videos are different because they're different lengths, and in a movie, you have more time to explore an idea. But I feel like they're all the same, really.
With food, you're the artist; you put the colour in it, you present it to the table and it has the ability to knock out the senses. It can look fabulous, be beautifully presented and smell great and taste good as well.
I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.
I grew up in a house of no love or emotion - it kind of sticks with you.
Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'
I'm crazy lucky. I was trying to be a filmmaker. I was doing Second City classes as a way to be creative. I was a PA for a long time. I was working as an assistant editor on 'Iron Chef America' when I got 'SNL.' It was one of those situations where you're concentrating in one thing and the peripheral thing popped.
People want to hear your stories about these wonderful experiences you have, and that's what press tours are for.
When you look at the state of the economy right now, you have to set a priority. And my top priority is the deficit of jobs and economic growth, and especially this perception that the United States could be falling behind especially Asian economies.
Just because you're from a city ten miles outside of St. Paul. It doesn't mean you don't read magazines, or the incredible Internet, and what's going on in the world. I never, ever take a client, or women, for granted.
David Lee Roth had the idea that if you covered a successful song, you were half way home. C'mon - Van Halen doing 'Dancing in the Streets'? It was stupid. I started feeling like I would rather bomb playing my own songs than be successful playing someone else's music.
My parents wanted to name me Karim Hill. My aunt always liked the name Dule, from this actor Keir Dullea, who was in '2001: Space Odyssey.' That's how I got the name Karim Dule Hill. Growing up, I never liked the name Karim because people would ask me, 'Could you dunk like Kareem Abdul Jabbar?'
You cry and you scream and you stomp your feet and you shout. You say, 'You know what? I'm giving up, I don't care.' And then you go to bed and you wake up and it's a brand new day, and you pick yourself back up again.
By providing clear objectives for your team, and setting guardrails for how they get there, you will set them on the path to success.
Life is funny. If you don't laugh, you're in trouble.
All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance.
For me, you can't be a big fat pig up there, slovenly and singing croaky and whatnot. You have to work.
If you can market smut and toilet paper, you can market movies.
A soulmate is someone who you could spend a great deal of time with just sitting on a sofa and feel happy. You don't need fanfare. You don't need to go out to expensive restaurants.
You know, I think I had my first past life recall when I was 7.
When I do a film score, I am basically nothing more than a fancy pencil for hire. I don't own any of the music when I am - it belongs to the film company - and likewise, when I am done, even if I come up with something astounding that I may want to revisit... in the world of film composition, you can't do that.
I really do not like auditioning... it's hard because you never know what you're going to walk into in a room.
I think there's just so many people in the world that don't feel understood, and when you hear a song and you go, 'Oh, that song understands me,' that's an amazing feeling. I get it when I listen to the radio... That's a beautiful part of music.
I often wonder if my being a fairly small Asian woman with a high-pitched quietish voice plays a role in how often men feel entitled to come up to me and tell me, 'You have this doll act,' or whatever.
The thing I worry about for myself is I spend a lot of time alone, and another person comes around and you're like, 'What are you doing here? Get out of here.'
Inside a company, you can mandate that everyone use the same technology, which means you can go a little bit, I don't know, higher fidelity than the lowest common denominator technology.
I think people are sort of waking up to it now, how probably the biggest change in Internet media isn't the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability. Which is actually terrifying if you're a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like.
Breaks in trust are infuriating and hurtful, but they don't entitle you to flame out, throw a fit, or stomp around rolling your eyes. Try to keep the steam from coming out of your ears.
I know this will blow your mind, but most people would probably never ever get it, but I listen to classical music when nobody else is around. It calms me down and I can get into this, like, deep thinking mode, you know, because there's really no lyrics to it, so you're not following something that - that you're listening to a story.
When I started out playing small clubs, you could feel the room recoil from certain kinds of songs. Anything that was too personal, that had a sentiment to it, or was laying out your feelings, was immediately booed. People would start throwing things. And anything that was really provocative or humorous or radical was embraced or cheered.
People read legal writing differently. When you're at the crux of a legal argument, every step is a step in the argument. The judge will see any holes. If you do that in fiction, it's too long and boring.
'The Iliad' is about a war 1,200 years ago that solved nothing and achieved nothing. Most of our wars achieve very little. But whatever agenda I have gets buried in a work this great. If you're being honest, you realize that, as an artist, you're not a policy maker.
When I'm making the music, I feel like everything I throw out has to work. It counts. Because if you don't have people turning they neck all the way around to see what it is, it ain't stick on the wall.
You never discount a demagogue.
As an actor, it's hard to direct because, suddenly, you're not around. The thing which I hate about directing is the waiting game, but you've really got to wait it out and be resilient and keep it going and keep everybody motivated.
If you choose to take a path in life, don't blame other people for the path you've chosen to take.
All we really want in life is to connect to other human beings, and when you desperately want to connect physically to one specific human being and you can't? That's something I find compelling.
