There's a few movies I wanted to do, and I didn't get to do them partly because they wanted me to be part of the horse and pony show, getting the money, and I'm just not doing that. There's a few movies that people wanted me to do, but they were too safe.
I'm always mystified by the day-to-day workings of entities like Twitter that provide framework but not content, but I suppose it could be compared to the U.S. Postal Service, which manages to keep a lot of people employed doing lots of stuff other than writing letters.
I think the way I sort of approach it is, you just sort of keep your head down and focus on what you are doing and making shows that people will want to see on Thursday night.
When you are trying to express things with metaphors and much more subtlety, that's when you are doing yourself a disservice by making a video.
Daring is doing. Daring is asking something outrageous despite your chances of failure and rejection. Daring is going out on a limb by believing in something that no one else understands, and if all fails, daring is trying again.
Dad would come home from doing odd jobs, and sometimes he'd come home late at night with lumber, and he'd rumble around with all this wood in our small place. We'd finish putting it away, and then we'd play that piano. I'll be eternally grateful to him.
I always was irritated doing network television... You're in love, you make love. That happens.
My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.
When I was in high school, I wasn't really popular. I was picked on a lot. And then I did a talent show, and kids started to tell me that I did a good job. It was the first time that my peers told me that they liked what I was doing. Something clicked, and I knew that this is what I wanted to do.
If you grow up in Britain, you just do Shakespeare. If you go and work in a theater once or twice or three times in your life, you're going to end up doing a Shakespeare, because he's obviously such a brilliant, brilliant writer.
Unbeknown to me, my manager, under my very nose (in a crouching position) has all these years been secretly compiling a book from my correspondence. I often wondered what she was doing in my office. She never did a stroke of work for me. All the time, I have been working for her.
A huge potential audience, great interaction with your readers, the ability to see what people like and what they don't, the ability to see how people respond to what you're doing in real-time - there's just tons of great stuff that you get by being online.
When you're on set, you're like, 'Everyone's judging me because I'm the director, and everyone thinks I'm doing this because I just love myself and I want to do everything.' Part of it's true: I do want to do everything, and I do kind of love myself.
I don't mind being identified as any character as long as I'm doing a good job as an actor. I have done all kinds of roles - from an editor, judge, police officer, murderer to a corrupt businessman.
I just like doing my job.
Even the dumber parts of our government are not run by idiots. These are ordinary people like us, doing a job. By and large, they're trying to do it as well as they can. Or at least as often as people in the private sector try to do as well as they can.
The only time I don't get nervous is if I'm doing a home club in L.A. and I know all of my friends there because then I play to my friends. When I first started doing comedy, I hated it when my friends came; it made me more nervous. Now I just try to make them laugh.
I'm one of the people that were divorced by 30, which is apparently a growing group... Obviously it's something that affects you forever. It's going to be interesting to see in ten, twenty years what kind of lasting effect young divorce has on the people that are doing it because it's becoming more and more common.
There is no point of doing anything if you're not going to do it all the way.
Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.
The mission of my company is to bring three things to the world through entertainment: joy, happiness, and change. We must believe our precious time is being used to make a product worth more than anything else we could be doing.
I promise you that during my life, I was more concerned about not letting people down, about doing my part, than I was ever into what it did for me.
I came out of the womb drawing on everything; I used to draw on my mother's white furniture and her white walls with her red lipstick and my pencils. Little did she know that would later materialize into me doing what I do now - I'm a painter as well and a micromechanical engineer.
I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I'm reviewing a book or doing research.
We just sort of thought a Web series would be a cool thing to be able to send to our parents to show them that we were, in fact, actually doing comedy.
It's always scary when you're doing a sequel to a film, because you don't want to just repeat the first film in a different location like most sequels. You want to do something totally different, and something that actually expands the world of the main character.
Countries all around the world, starting with the U.K., have started behavioural insight teams, often referred to as nudge units. And they seem to be doing lots of good.
As long as you're not hurting anybody else, as long as you're being kind to people and you're doing what you love, only good things can come of it.
I have my own worries and concerns and frustrations, but I'm doing something I love to do. My wife and kids are in good shape. What is there not to be happy about?
With young people, I always say, 'You're not doing anyone any favours by withholding your power.' As women, we do that a lot because we are afraid of being misunderstood or perceived as too strong. But the older I'm getting, the more I realise you have to let that go.
Excellence is about fighting and pursuing something diligently, with a strict and determined approach to doing it right. It's okay if there are flaws in the process - it makes it more interesting.
I never wanted to do film. I don't have the right face, and I don't like stardom. I like the fact that I have this wonderful thing that gives you status, but I'm most interested in doing decent work.
Sometimes, great collaboration is hard to nurture online, so doing so offline is the way to go.
I went to college for, like, a year and a half with the intention of doing some kind of art therapy or some kind of teaching of art, because I feel like art is a more free area in school than music is. I feel like music is too mathematic for me. Music school's so hard. It's math.
After years of doing it, you learn the difference between your ego and your opinion. When you're married you have to cut through that.
I always felt like what I was doing wasn't selling toys; I was making a happy sound at Christmas. When people hear something so familiar, it brings them back to a special place, and that's been meaningful for me.
