I love the sea, but I avoid any sort of seaside resort that has skyscrapers or seaside entertainments.
I think I did a lot of really stupid stuff really quickly in my twenties and that sort of led me to want to sort of just relax a little bit. Relax a lot.
In Australia, I grew up watching 'The Mickey Mouse Club,' my son grew up watching 'Sesame Street,' my grandson's growing up watching 'Dora The Explorer.' So we are sort of saturated with American culture from the day we're born, and to those of those who do have an ear for it, it's second nature.
I was always a little embarrassed when there was an act on television that requires a great deal of skill but is a little goofy, and the host comes over and acts like the person doing this skill is some sort of fool for having learned to do something that's very, very difficult.
With Shakespeare, because you invest so much time in working on material, it always sort of stays with you to some degree.
If I don't get along with Democrats, I'm sort of, like, out of business.
I feel like, genre-wise, the walls are coming down in Nashville. There are so many writers who have moved to town from all walks of life. There's this immense respect for country, but there are pop songwriters, R&B. Nashville has become sort of this go-to writing city for every genre.
Fantasy is sort of a blank slate that everybody can project their own culture onto. Everybody can read it in their own way.
I'm from Canada, and I think, like everyone growing up anywhere else in the world, you are very aware of America - it sort of looms large in its legend, and so did Detroit.
I used to be on dance team in high school; it was called drill team in Texas. And when I started doing theater sophomore year, I had to make a decision which thing I was gonna follow. It was a big shift because I sort of had all these friends on dance squad, and when I started to do theater, my whole identity shifted.
I like Diaspora because it's audacious, it's driven by passion, and it's very, very hard to do. After all, who in their right mind would set as a goal taking on Facebook? That's sort of like deciding to build a better search engine - very expensive, with a high likelihood of failure.
I like to do things sort of intuitively, I think.
Awards can't be what's important in your life. Because that only affects you in a sense. Life is so much more than that: It's your family and your friends and that sort of thing.
If you think about 'The Pill' by Loretta, that was totally blacklisted back then. But she revolutionized and liberated a generation of women - country listeners and beyond - that were sort of in that box and were able to break out of it.
I don't know where the ideas come from, and it's terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I'd walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I'm just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.
I had some years of definite frustration. Auditioning and not working as much as I would have liked to, or working and being paid a pittance, and sort of scrounging by in New York and sleeping on a chair that folded out into a bed.
Obama's people will all often complain about how trivial and silly the media is, but there's no president who's probably benefited from this sort of trivialness or superficial nature as President Obama.
Every walk that I do, there's obstacles in the way. There's always somebody or something that comes across negative, but I live for that sort of thing.
Some social scientists say that in-group/out-group biases are hard-wired into the human brain. Even without overt prejudice, it is cognitively convenient for people to sort items into categories and respond based on what is usually associated with those categories: a form of statistical discrimination, playing the odds.
I'm a wet liberal really, and always have been. But I'm sort of an aggressive wet liberal.
It is sort of boring to stay in the same spot. You know, I didn't set out to become the first to do this, the first to do that. It was just that my interests were so diversified.
When good things come in, my agent calls or sends me the script. But I allow them to sort through the offers so that I am not just sitting and reading everything because honestly, sometimes the scripts that appeal to me are projects that are not good projects, but I just really like the script or the characters.
What happens a lot in film, though not so much in the theatre, is that you get stroked and sort of massaged, like a little guinea pig.
Hollywood's a big place, and they make all sorts of different movies. Some movies I'm attracted to; a lot of the movies I'm not. But there are some terrifically talented people over there that I'd love to work with.
It's very true that you can be both selfless and selfish at the same time. What we tend towards, particularly in filmmaking, is this binary sort of, 'This is a good guy, this is a bad guy.' And I quite like the fact that life is a bit more complex than that.
I don't even think whether I play the blues or not, I just play whatever feels right at the moment. I also will use any gadget or device that I find that helps me achieve the sort of sound on the guitar that I want to get.
In Hollywood films everything is tidied up at the end with clean lines and clean character definitions. It's sort of unsatisfying.
For me, I need to fully immerse myself in a script to the point where I'm literally locking myself away for weeks at a time and I just write it. So I can write twelve to fifteen hours in a day, with breaks in between, obviously, but I need to just sort of live within the world of the script.
I'm a germ-phobe when I meet a lot of people or shake a lot of hands. I always have hand sanitizer and alcohol swabs so I can sort of go back and forth between the two.
I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.
Often I think bullying - especially in its adult, verbal forms - is the sort of thing you don't realize till the end of the day, and it's a horrible feeling to realize something wasn't just a bland statement, but was actually cruel. But then we're all capable of - of things that are breathtakingly cruel.
I fell so hard for the theater. I knew it was a place where you can sort out your life.
Maybe I over-do the 'not-80s' thing. It should be a part of my life that I've got some sort of pride in, but I've got this huge chip on my shoulder about '80s nostalgia - and it annoys fans sometimes.
I really had to come to the conclusion, the sort of humbling conclusion that, guess what, I'm no different than anybody else: I've got to sort of ask for help - not something I ever did, ever. And then part two of that is, like, accept it when it comes, and, you know, believe what people tell me.
My uncle was in a ska band called the Top Cats; that was my first proper influence, as I was taken to see them every week. It sort of built up, the want to replicate it creatively.
And now, I'm a best selling author, a different sort of fairy tale that I still sometimes wonder when I'll wake up from.
