With 'Black Rain,' I spent a lot of time with homicide detectives, and I spent a lot of time with different brokers on 'Wall Street.' It helps get the rhythm of the piece and the tone, and how overplayed or underplayed it might be. That's also the magic of movies: You get to hang out and live these different lives.
Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.
Technically you need the extra dimensions. At first people didn't like them too much, but they've got a big benefit, which is that the ability of string theory to describe all the elementary particles and their forces along with gravity depends on using the extra dimensions.
It makes it very exciting don't you think to live in an age of, of discovery of human personality this way?
Beauty can make you powerful in a way that isn't good for you. Being OK is better for the person I have become.
I think top scientists need to be compensated at a different scale in society. Somebody with experience will tell you that true scientists are not motivated by money - they are motivated by the quest itself. That is true. But I think an additional recognition will not hurt.
Where you come from is such a huge part of who you are today.
Starring in a science-fiction film doesn't mean you have to act science fiction.
The one thing I think you must do is, as painful as it is as a parent, is listen.
Half the battle is that people have to like you before you say one joke, one bit of humor.
Some of these people think the universe is five thousand years old, and they say it with a straight face. If somebody had an explanation saying why they thought the earth was five thousand years old, there's only two possible explanations: you're really stupid, or you're really cynical and trying to get really stupid people's votes.
It's better to have done because then you know what the player is going through and you understand the pressure, but then on the other hand I know a lot of people that were good players but not good coaches, and vice versa.
I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.
I don't like a tormented photograph. Something attracts you in them, but the attraction isn't because she has a pot on her head or tonnes of make-up and weird clothes and weird everything.
I am a leader. Leaders always get heat. They're always going against the grain. Jimi Hendrix got heat; Bob Marley got heat; Miles Davis got heat. Every great artist got heat. Heat means you're doing something right.
You gotta take care of the people that are part of the foundation. If you don't, it crumbles.
People watch me, waiting for me to slip up, so my privacy has gone - but that's a price you pay.
One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.
I'm like, 'What world am I living in?' Aren't movies made to have something to say? Why make a movie if you don't have something to say? What are you doing it for? Are you doing it because you want to make a lot of money?
A lot of my albums that I've done, a lot of the songs have been the first take. It's before you mess with it too much - you can take away all the spontaneity and the emotion of something by trying to make it sound perfect.
I'm interested in the essence of things. If you pare things down, what's left? It's like I'm trying to describe the soul to an alien.
I don't know what has happened to movies, but lately every movie is at least 20 minutes too long. It used to be that if you were three hours long it was because it was epic - a movie about Gandhi; something with very important subject matters.
Be who you are. It's easy to feel like you have to blend in, but it takes courage to live your life with conviction and embrace the person that you are.
I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know.
It might sound a small thing, but if you want to get Tom Cruise into your movie, without a track record or without those agents knowing you, it's almost impossible. Now I can get through to pretty much anyone I want. Of course, 90 per cent of the time they still say no.
You do not defend a world that is already lost.
Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.
Rogues, would you live forever?
You won't really see me at any events, any nightclubs.
A quarterback that goes out and performs for you and is a franchise quarterback is more valuable than a player playing another position, but there's a lot more risk there. It's a more difficult position to play, and there are lot more failures.
You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being.
I call it dark energy. If you are unreliable, customers just disappear.
I much prefer playing the bad guys. I think they are always the most interesting characters. I liken it to painting: if you're playing the good guy, you get three colors: red, white and blue. But if you're the bad guy, you get the whole palette.
Compassion knows that choosing the higher road in any situation is the most loving option for you.
The United States has the best, deepest, widest, and most transparent capital markets in the world which give you, the investor, the ability to buy and sell large amounts at very cheap prices. That is a good thing.
You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.
