Usually, as a fiction writer, you get e-mails saying, 'I liked your book,' or 'I didn't like it.' You don't get something saying, 'I'm really glad this is in the world.'
Famous people are deceptive. Deep down, they're just regular people. Like Larry King. We've been friends for forty years. He's one of the few guys I know who's really famous. One minute he's talking to the president on his cell phone, and then the next minute he's saying to me, 'Do you think we ought to give the waiter another dollar?'
Everyone who sits on a sofa watching 'Match of the Day' is a top soccer expert, as you know. So if you start to worry about such people reading your story and saying, 'That'd never happen' you're going to freeze up. You're writing fiction, and your characters can do whatever you need them to do.
Some people are really proud of me, and some don't like it. I don't really know what to tell those people. It's like people that don't know me or people that aren't even my friends saying I've changed. I have two friends - exactly two friends. It's like, how can someone that's not even my friend say I've changed?
If journalists ask you again and again about the same bands, you'll end up saying you hate them just because you're so fed up with being asked all those stupid questions.
Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've discovered about myself and about the world I'm in. I would like to share this with you.'
I am my own cheerleader. I am the one who puts my goals, who pushes myself to get to the next goal. I don't have someone next to me saying, 'Here you go, now do this, it's your next step, go for it.'
I'm glad people think that I can do well. I always say I would rather that be the scenario than on the other end of it saying, 'We thought she'd be real crappy.' I'll take the side that I'm on. I'll take that people think that I'm going to do well; they have faith in me and believe in me, and that makes me feel stronger.
When I was in college, I was always saying I was a socialist.
I made the decision that I was going to make rap music in, like, fourth grade, so it's been something I was saying for a long time.
In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.
Learn graceful ways of saying no and of pointing out that this pressure to do something is not in line with most people's wishes.
I see a lot of actors that are doing things to please their coaches, their teachers in the past. They say 'No' to parts they should have said 'Yes' to simply because of the opinion of people in their past. I have no one in my past who is judging me and saying, 'Maybe you shouldn't do that.' I'll do it all.
I'm not saying that atheists can't act morally or have moral knowledge. But when I ascribe virtue to an atheist, it's as a theist who sees the atheist as conforming to objective moral values. The atheist, by contrast, has no such basis for morality. And yet all moral judgments require a basis for morality, some standard of right and wrong.
Well, what's interesting, I try not to think about the radio when I'm writing a song. I want people to love the song, and that means it might not be exactly thinking about the radio, but it's thinking about your audience and saying, 'I want people to like this song after it's done.'
I'll tell you one thing. I've never heard a director saying that the dailies suck.
I will fall in love with any golf course that you have to drive the ball straight. You understand what I'm saying? That's my advantage. My advantage wasn't putting. In fact, I wasn't even a great putter or a good putter.
Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying, 'Whatever.'
There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'
How we absorb music is unique. I know what I do. When I'm listening to music, I tend to find myself in a song. That's what really makes you connect is if you feel what that song is saying.
'Birdman' has kinda... changed things. I'm not saying you won't see traditionally made movies any more. But I've had meetings with directors, and they've said it makes them rethink everything. You can hate this movie, but you have to talk about it. It's going to go down as one of the most interesting movies ever made.
No one realizes how hard parenthood is. I am not saying going into the office is easy. It's not. But parenthood, as fun as it is, is not for the fainthearted.
As soon as you become of interest to the media, the charity requests start rolling in, and it's not easy saying no. But if you endorse every charity that asks you, you're not really endorsing any of them. It has to mean something.
To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.
Acting is really about showing up that day and telling the writers what you feel like saying.
There is a saying that every single person in the world has something to teach you. So the more people I get to work with, the more I can learn, and the better actor I will become.
I read a quote by James Dean when I was 17; he said, 'I'd rather starve than do a whole bunch of work that I don't care about.' The older I got, the more I understood what he was saying. If I want to do a whole lot of work that I don't care about, then I would probably be working in a law office somewhere.
When somebody says, 'This must be a children's book,' basically they're saying, 'You must be a child.' And so my answer is, 'Well, yes, I guess I am a child.' But I don't think of myself that way.
Everybody keeps saying that India's a poor country. Yes, we have poverty. But I blame the government of India, the political establishment, for their failure to educate and therefore their failure to control the poverty.
I always try and hold to that saying, 'I want to work on things I'd want to see.' The vast majority, that's been true.
Harper Collins gave me a letter of intent saying that they want me to pen down my autobiography. When I was recollecting the incidents of my life for that, I selected only those incidents which were turning points in my life. I staged it instead of writing it.
We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.
The minute the church and pastors start saying what do people want and then giving it to them, we betray our calling. We're called to have people follow Jesus. We're called to have people learn how to forgive their enemies.
I've said the Grammys messed up metal because it's not on TV. What I'm saying is when you're in a metal category, it's not televised, and it doesn't move the needle forward for metal artists, and I wish they had more respect for the genre.
As for Aliki - if you were to stand in the middle of Rome and say the name Sophia Loren, or Paris and say the name Catherine Deneuve or Brigitte Bardot, or L.A. and the name Marilyn Monroe, it's like standing in Athens, or anywhere in wide-flung Greece, and saying Aliki Vougiouklaki. A huge star - and so little known elsewhere in the world.
My respect for artists is very high. I think to get the most out of them, you have to liberate them. I think part of liberating them is saying, 'Come up with something brilliant, new, and fresh. Stop thinking based on what has been beat into you by executives or publishers in terms of what's going to work and what's not. Don't react, just act.'
