I didn't like the Feds coming to town when I was in Miami, telling me what to do. I didn't like them coming to town and thinking that they knew more about Miami than I do.
Sometimes, I wonder where my place in this town called 'Hollywood' is - and that can give you a really dull headache.
Hollywood is a town; it's not a medium. And cinema is a medium you can practice anywhere.
How could these people in the public eye not be afraid of me, but my whole town was?
I feel lucky that I got to work with some of the big legends in town.
I have an idea for a movie called 'The Walken Dead' which is about a town where, instead of zombies, everyone becomes Chris Walken.
There are three types of pitchers you have to deal with. Some, you just have to tell what town they're in, remind them where they are. Some, you remind them about mechanics, and some, you have to bust their tail. You have to make them your friend and have them trust you.
When a town doesn't have a book store, it is like something is missing, and unfortunately, fewer and fewer have them.
I don't care what town you're born in, what city, what country. If you're a child, you are curious about your environment. You're overturning rocks. You're plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you're doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.
I was 19 when I wrote 'Dreams,' and that would have been when it started to happen. The band got signed, and I was probably beginning to see different things besides my small town of Ballybricken.
You have the wookie character, which is one of the biggest aliens in 'Defiance.' These guys are just walking about with these mechanical faces on, and it actually looks insane. The amount of diversity of all the aliens in the town is quite unbelievable.
I was living in Seattle. I was 21 years old, just going to do theater. And I got a call that David Lynch was in town and wanted to meet with me.
I married a pretty famous girl, and when we drive through town there's usually a car following us, when I walk out of my front door in Chelsea there's six guys waiting for me.
I was born and grew up in Fitzgerald, way down in south Georgia. It was a mill town and my family ran the cotton mill. My grandfather was mayor many times and my family felt deeply rooted to that spot.
I got hit by the bug of reading - not via a person, but via the one-room library in our small town. I remember that the children's books were in the right-hand corner near the floor. Often when I went there, I was the only visitor.
My parents being Bengali, we always had music in our house. My nani was a trained classical singer, who taught my mum, who, in turn, was my first teacher. Later I would travel almost 70 kms to the nearest town, Kota, to learn music from my guru Mahesh Sharmaji, who was also the principal of the music college there.
I grew up in a very small town, but it happened to be in western Massachusetts, where there were a lot of gay people. I remember my aunt going to a gay wedding when I was 11, and I thought it was the coolest thing.
I was raised in a small town in Indiana and educated at Ball State University.
In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we'd go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father's televised service for 17 years.
I'm probably not your typical business person in many ways. I don't wear a suit. I don't carry a briefcase. I don't wear a tie. I'm fairly casual. I haven't got a big office, and it's in a very ordinary part of town. I'd much prefer to downplay than impress.
I have a cartoon I'm developing with Adult Swim called 'Monster Town U.S.A.,' so I'm busy doing that. Trying to do a coffee-table book of my photography that's been requested of me a couple of times. I'm constantly busy.
I don't paint the town red. But when I do go out, people always want to touch my hair. It happens every time.
When I was young, my family didn't go on outings to the circus or trips to Disneyland. We couldn't afford them. Instead, we stayed in our small rural West Texas town, and my parents took us to cemeteries.
I grew up listening to so many different things, and having a dad that also sang, music was innately born into me. Going through high school and college, I'd go see anyone who came to town, it didn't matter the genre.
Seattle very much benefited from this geography where it was a town nobody had really heard of in terms of a music scene. So we had that factor of being a new discovery.
I think college football is a reflection of Middle America. You go into a college football town, and you will find three generations of a family sitting together. It's a rallying point for the university, the community, and the families.
You can't run this nation like a town meeting.
My wife was born and raised in Italy until she was about 9, and then she came to America, and her mom was a great cook, and they have great recipes, and whenever her mom would come into town, we would have all these friends just randomly showing up at our house, and eventually we figured out why. They wanted Mama's cooking.
The infrastructure we provide is the same in a remote town in Africa or New York or an archipelago in Sweden: we use the same system, and the chips inside the phone are the same.
It came to me that the one thing I could do was cook. And I figured I couldn't do any worse than the people running these places around town.
I traveled to Ireland to research 'Sandcastles,' to visit the coastline where my ancestors looked toward America, the tiny town they once loved so much, and the docks from which they sailed toward their dreams of building a better life for their family. The answers I found on that journey are woven through the novel.
Put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming artist living in early-sixteenth-century Italy. Now imagine trying to distinguish yourself from the other artists living in your town: Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian. Is it any wonder that the Italian High Renaissance lasted only 30 years?
So far, Senate Republicans are good at getting Facebook likes and town halls and not much else. Do something.
Every small town has its dramatic group, its barber-shop quartet, every home has music in one form or another.
What about the accusation that Hollywood is trying to advance its liberal agenda? Well, the fact is, while the creative community admittedly leans left, Hollywood has become a corporate town.
I might have made more money if I had outsourced to India, and I knew I'd find it easier to hire senior managers in London. But I wanted to be in Stoke. What could be more satisfying than creating work for 3,000 people in my home town?
