Sometimes when you turn a hobby into a job, it becomes work.
I don't miss directing at all, and I don't miss screenwriting either because somebody's always telling you to do something different.
I don't want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it's not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God.
What happens is you submit your script with an idea of what the budget might be, and the financier will offer you less than that. In order to do it for less, it means cutting out the art, usually.
Someone else is going to read for me or go at my place to the mosque, and/or to tell me you shouldn't take anything from the West because the West is the enemy and so on. It is to me to decide. I am intelligent enough to be critical towards the West and take what I need and reject what is bad for me.
You question, as anybody should, the overarching worth of your profession, right? So that's a question I've often asked myself.
Imagine you're doing your thing, and somebody comes up to you and just kills your mojo. Just tell them, 'No flex zone!'
As a designer, I think you just have to make sure you know what you want and stay true to it. You need to have conviction and really just want to make people think in regards to doing interesting things.
For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.
I think it's always hard to find great roles, no matter what age you are. So I always say to people, 'You have to remember that Hollywood is in the business of making movies that they can sell tickets to; they're not in the business of finding great roles for actors.'
I've played different nationalities, and everything from vulnerable to strong to crooked to demented. It just increases your possibilities of work because, if people know you can do just about anything, then you're going to get more offers. That's what I want to do.
Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.
I tell my kids, 'I'm your father, not your friend - but I'm also the best friend you're ever going to have because no one is going to care for you the way I care about you.'
Thematically, I like playing with the ideas of stuff that you try to bury, and you think will go away, but instead you carry it with you until it becomes crippling. And sometimes you have to look back and deal with some stuff in order to truly move forward.
It's a sense of pride, a sense of you set out to get a record deal, and we got that. We set out to get a No. 1 record, and then we got that. Then you say, 'Wow, that was impossible and now even more impossible is to stay No. 1 and stay current and put out new records that people care about,' and we really stuck to that.
If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story.
You wonder, 'How could it possibly be me?' Well, of course it could happen to you. You have it. Then, of course, you wake up every morning, and you hope it's a bad dream. Then you wake up. I have cancer.
If you get a sense that your writing isn't quite working, change it. Or cut it out. Don't just tell yourself it'll do, because it won't.
You don't think about the danger. The spaceship becomes your home.
If you're convinced as an artist of what you're doing, the only move is to, no matter what people say or what management says or your best friends say or people on Facebook, do what you do, and people will find their way to it.
Looking after your ears is unfortunately something you don't think about until there's a problem.
It's all about surprising people, and you're not surprising people if you're making them laugh every five seconds.
Whenever I see young girls wearing way too much makeup... you're young, you don't need that much.
When you're doing a TV show, it's not like you just shoot for six weeks and you're in an editing room with all of your footage. It's like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what's not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.
You know those adages about smelling the roses and chasing butterflies? The markets are my butterflies and my roses.
In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.
History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
I suppose you could say that I majored in men and minored in psychology.
It's not the winning that teaches you how to be resilient. It's the setback. It's the loss.
Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They're solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.
I like a good boy, but sometimes you get bored.
When you have armed militants, aided and abetted by a major country like Russia, able to use surface-to-air missiles to bring down a commercial airline, that is a form of terrorism.
You don't need to raise taxes on rich people, because they create capitalization and investment. But you need to tax speculation - meaning capital gains.
If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.
So many people are stealing Bikram Yoga. It's like you're practicing medicine, but you're not a doctor.
The only thing that will make you happy is being happy with who you are, and not who people think you are.
