I would feel ill without theater. It's kind of a cliche, but every time you make a mistake, you really do have to learn from it to move on. When you're doing something live, there's no time to dwell. Hopefully you'll laugh it off, but if not, you can always take a day to hate yourself.
Turns out, what I love doing is making games. Not hyping games or trying to sell a lot of copies. I just want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak.
I wanted to do what I was seeing Dorothy Dandridge doing, what I saw Marilyn Monroe do, what I saw Bette Davis do. I wanted to do that: to tell stories. I wanted to make people laugh, make people cry. I wanted to be a storyteller.
Most people I know that are successful have a few things in common that are undeniable: driving ambition, and they have applied that to something they're good at, that they love doing... and they are fun to be around, especially when they're talking about their passion.
No one has to agree with everything that someone else says. But in state-to-state relations, we have to understand that we can help each other much more doing it that way. We have to be more generous.
The best way to learn is by doing. The only way to build a strong work ethic is getting your hands dirty.
I got started as an actress doing musical theater, and I always loved 'Grease' and 'West Side Story,' and all those kind of movies.
Sometimes when you're doing fantasy, that's the most important thing, is to be a blank space, because the last thing you want to do ever as an actor is judge yourself or the character or the movie that you're in. You want to just play the moment as best you can. Juilliard helped me do that.
I didn't really want to inject myself into anything political. A lot of people were asking me at the time about Jay and Conan, and I hate doing anything serious.
I see my share of loons. I just performed with someone who had a meltdown on stage. He needed focus, and he was 'stealing it' and just being crazy and selfish and childish and having a great time doing it - to the detriment of everybody else.
I could never really imagine myself doing one thing, and I'm pretty sure that I'll end up doing four or five different things. I want to be a Renaissance woman. I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I want to just do everything.
Day-to-day, I don't wear make-up, my hair's not done, and I'm in ripped jeans and a Bonds tee. But doing red carpets is just part of work.
I love to go into the studio on days when I'm not even doing anything. It's like my senior club. Some people go to senior centers, well I go to my senior center.
Our live set's become increasingly complex recently; we've been doing stuff that's been vastly too much information for most people to deal with and I think it's quite interesting watching how people behave in those situations, under those circumstances.
Sometimes you go for weeks without writing successfully, and you don't feel like a writer anymore. When friends ask me how my week was or how I'm doing, I think back on it, and I've just been by myself. Like, I'm just a sketch.
I've thought about writing, but it hasn't happened yet. It's like schoolwork - you start doing your revisions two nights before you're compelled to turn it in.
All actors know that the real adrenaline rush is in doing theatre. There is an immediate connect, and a role in a play, for an actor, is the biggest temptation.
I think if I'd quit years ago, I'd never have known what I was capable of doing.
I've always been motivated to stop people from doing dysfunctional things.
I never thought I'd be doing TV. I've always loved it, but I felt like I was just going to do Broadway because that was what I wanted to do the most.
There's no question that my son is better prepared for college than I was. He manages his time better, is more efficient and more directed, and spends less time in lines and more time doing exactly what he sets out to do.
Let's make sure we're doing what we can in our own backyard to gain our energy independence and to create American jobs with American energy.
It's human nature that we come in our own flavours, and it doesn't make any sense to write a monochromatic or monocultural story unless you're doing something extremely small - a locked room-style story.
My success set me up for life, and it meant that I could retire from the music industry at 27 to spend time with my newborn daughter and my wife. My time away from the spotlight allowed me to rediscover my love for music, and I'm doing it for me now and no one else.
Looking back at it now, it's almost overwhelming, the amount of work that went into writing 'Shine', and to come up with the ideas that we're doing now.
Poverty is an artificial, external imposition on a human being; it is not innate in a human being. And since it is external, it can be removed. It is just a question of doing it.
On Friday night, if you want to go out on a date with your wife or your girlfriend, nothing on Netflix competes with that, right? Because you're getting out; that's what you're doing. If you don't want to put your shoes on, nothing in the cinema competes with the worst thing on Netflix.
Following our inner guidance may feel risky and frightening at first, because we are no longer playing it safe, doing what we 'should' do, pleasing others, following rules, or deferring to outside authority.
My mother was very, very critical of my early efforts. She was, like, 'At your age, the Brontes were doing X, Y, and Z.'
We live in such a celebrity-driven culture, but all those people have to go buy toilet paper, and all those people have products they use and their favorite sweet treats. They all have to write to-do lists, and they're all reading books - well, hopefully most people are doing those things.
I'm a happy camper because by doing this I have an opportunity to be on the cutting edge of research.
I always wanted to find my voice and claim my tone, but I was doing it through the steps of being a TV writer. I had the executive producer title. I was running the room.
Doing 'Young Adult' was really reassuring to me in a lot of ways. It confirmed a lot of suspicions I had about great actors.
You never want to rest on your laurels. You want to keep doing things that terrify you.
I think prejudice has gotten to a point where a lot of people hold biases in their mind and don't even realize that they're doing it, because it's deeply ingrained in the fabric of what it means to be an American.
I started performing when I was 9 or 10, doing magic.
