Mum decided that I could sing a bit, so she put me in a choir, which I hated, and it was just a nightmare. I was a rebellious sort of choirboy.
The main thing experience has taught me is that one has to sort of hone their relationship to time, you know.
As much as I long for a sort of security and consistency sometimes, I do enjoy sort of being busted around. I really don't know what's happening sometimes next week, let alone this year.
If you're from a certain generation, you basically learn to read with 'Peanuts.' It's sort of the template for the modern strip. Its influence ceased to be noticed because it's in everything.
I'm just angry at the sort of things that are winding up in ground beef. I'm angry that other people - mainly children - are going to be sickened by eating a hamburger.
The instruments that bleed into each other are what creates the ambience. Once you start cleaning everything up, you lose it. You lose that sort of halo that bleeding creates. Then if you eliminate the halo, you have to go back and put in some artificial reverb, which is never as good.
From a certain age, I sort of accepted myself for what I was. And although to other people it was like nothing ever goes right, I had a really nice attitude that I'd inherited from my parents, and especially from my dad.
'Knowing' is one of those movies where you're going to get the spectacle, and you're going to have the entertainment in the grand science fiction tradition. But also, it will perhaps stimulate some discussion to help you sort out on your own where you might choose to go in terms of your own needs. Now, I say that without preaching.
Even while starting out I took things very seriously; I wasn't the sort of kid that would do a doll commercial or do a series for Nickelodeon. They asked me to do silly things, and I wasn't a silly kid.
I remember very vividly - I wrote about it in one of my books - my first IRA. I contributed $2,000 every year, and in 21 years, the funds in that IRA account grew to $260,000. Seems like sort of a miracle, but it happened.
A studio allows me more freedom. You can create your own sort of reality which is actually more exciting than shooting on location. You can conjure up a complete atmosphere of escapism for the public.
Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.
Particularly black Americans, many of them, from quotes that I have seen and conversations I've had, are sort of insulted that the civil rights movement is being hijacked - the rhetoric of the civil rights movement is being hijacked for something like same sex marriage. Black Americans tend to have a higher degree of religiosity.
The number one person who needs my books is me. I'm not some sort of disinterested guru who has worked life out and is handing things out to the poor people who might not have life worked out.
I'm just not a crazy, stay-out-all-night sort of person. I love writing.
Drama usually has some sort of intense conflict.
I was young; I was newly married. My Cambridge degree was still warm in my pocket - a roll of parchment guaranteeing me, I thought, a sort of free ambassadorial passage to any campus of my choosing, and I had chosen Sydney - the world was all before me.
Johnny Knoxville has such an incredible humanity to him when you meet him. He's so warm and so funny, and he can sort of get into trouble and you sort of forgive him immediately.
We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.
When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.
I want to do some bigger films, so long as there's some sort of exciting creative element or a good filmmaker behind them.
I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.
Diana Wynne Jones' excellent book 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland' is a compendium of the sort of lazy writing that has given fantasy fiction - especially the sub-section that features elves and dwarves and other Tolkienesque elements - a bad name.
I like to mix it up, yeah. I don't sort of think, 'Oh, I need to do a comedy, I've done three dramas this year.' I don't think of it like that, but I definitely from project to project I feel like I want to just do something different all of the time and stop, I don't want to bore myself or anyone else.
For me, the movie's always evolving as I'm doing it. I throw things in as we shoot, and I take things out as we go. I want to create a whole life and then select the pieces that best sort of describe it later, you know? So there's a lot of wastage when I make a film.
My father raised us like... we were not allowed to see people in any sort of colors, but also we were not allowed to call people fat. If ever we were to say, 'Oh that fat person, or this person,' he would make us put a bar of soap in our mouth and count to 10. We weren't allowed to look at people like that.
Kids are plugged into some sort of electronic medium 44 hours per week.
I love visiting LA. It's an endlessly fascinating city, and is, of course, America's entertainment capital. Each time I go, I fall in love with it all over again. That said, it's not the sort of place I'd want to live.
I mean, movies in general tend to sort of portray time, space and identity as these very solid things. Time moves forward. Space is what it is. You are you, and you're always you.
When you don't have a voice like Michele Bachmann's, who personifies all of the good things that the Tea Party has come to mean to America, then it's more difficult to have any sort of unified or representative message with the same profile in the media.
Thank you for reminding Canada that I'm a disappointment to them. I like hockey, I love it, but I'm not an avid hockey - let's face it, true Canadian - fan. I've always been more into snowboarding and skateboarding and sort of the alternative sports, I'm not crazy about hockey - but love it!
I sort of straddle the line... between personal movies and mainstream Hollywood.
Many movie stars or American Idol contestants sort of fall into theater... and say, 'Oh, yeah, I would love to do theater.' And then they get here and say, 'Oh, wait a minute, this actually is a craft!' It's not just show up one day and do it. It's show up eight times a week, twice on Wednesdays and twice on Saturdays.
That is definitely something that I feel more comfortable with now. When I did 'Lord of the Rings,' it was something I wasn't quite prepared for, I didn't know how to deal with that sort of attention, and I kind of shied away from that, but I'm better at dealing with that now - a lot better.
I'm an odd mixture. I'm a sort of Geordie punk who started in classical theatre. It means nobody ever knows quite where to put me, but I like that.
I'm sort of half-Chilean at this point anyway, half-Argentine. This is where I have been living and working for a long time now.
