My friends in Paris are writers, or something like that, whereas my friends in New York are doing cool stuff in finance and living very different lives. In writing, it's pretty solitary, so it doesn't really matter who's around.
I think we get too hung up on categories. Obviously, the book market has to categorise things, and it makes it easier for a reader to go into a bookshop and choose, but as a writer, it helps to get rid of all of that and imagine you are a storyteller around a campfire.
Consensus isn't just about agreement. It's about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it, you come up with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.
That's the great thing about university: you've got people around you who are taking a risk and trying things out themselves. It gives you the confidence to try and take it to the next step, which was drama school.
I play Nitin Sawhney's 'Letting Go' repeatedly, nonstop. I find it transformative. I'm so glad iPods were invented so I didn't have to drive everyone around me mad with the repetition.
My wife was the first art collector in the family, and I didn't become interested until around 1973. The first important artwork we bought was a Van Gogh drawing of two peasant houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
You know those people in life who are a bit eccentric and larger than life or a bit odd? That their realm of possibility around them is larger than somebody who's called normal? What's normal for an oddball? They could start screaming in public. That's fun to play.
How can we think we are protected if terrorists can move around freely, if weapons can circulate freely?
I like to comprehend more or less everything around me - apart from the creation of my music. It's an obsessive character trait that's getting worse. I don't switch the light on and off 15 times before I leave the room yet, but something's going wrong.
When I was younger, I played sports and went to camp. As I got older, my parents began to instill in us the importance of giving back to the community, especially those places around the world that are less fortunate than my very privileged life growing up in Los Angeles.
I had taken on the color of the climate around me and had driven back all the emotion that rose from the Brooklyn streets so that I could belong to the exclusive club of Congress.
What worries me are these so-called radio stations with program directors who don't play all the different flavors of hip-hop. They should play the old with the new, 24/7, 365 days a year. A lot of these program directors are just jiving around and not playing all the good music for the people.
If I wait for the great definitive story of my people to come around, I'm never going to work.
The theatre training is second to none in Ireland and England. You meet people who haven't had theatre training - it is harder for people who worked in TV to go into theatre than the other way around.
When I was auditioning for 'Gotham,' I got a handful of comics from different decades, so I had a perspective - it's been around for 75 years, which is a long time.
One time, I was literally stopped on the street, literally and physically whipped around by this guy who looked at my face and was like, 'Are you Felix?' I looked very different then. I was like, 'Yah... Oh, yah!' I was stunned and slightly frightened.
When you discover first love as a teenager, your whole life revolves around it and you open yourself up to it.
Before I changed my diet, every time I ate, my torso would feel burning hot, and the areas around my lymph nodes would really ache.
I'm sure I would have been considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter. It's just not the way I roll. I love being a curator and a musicologist. People write me letters and thank me for turning them on to Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace, and that's partly my job this time around.
Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear.
When I get old, I'm going to the old folks' home. I don't want to be one of those guys who's hanging around the house bothering the kids. But not just any old folks' home. I want the whole top floor.
People don't appreciate that when you're on the Internet, it's a 24/7 job. Even if you're not releasing episodes, your show is living and breathing on the Internet because there's a community around it. Ninety percent of the work is after the web series is shot, and you have to constantly maintain your community, because it's all you have.
Is truth always positive? Of course. Once the truth comes out, you know, it's all right. We're scared that if the truth comes out that it's not all right. It's the other way around.
We moved around a lot when I was growing up. I was always the new kid in class, but I was good at making friends. With an upbringing like that, I was either going to become an actor or a politician. Thank God I became an actor! I'm not cut out for politics.
I have friends come over and we read plays out loud and I make paintings and I just do things all the time just so I don't ever feel like I'm sitting around.
I didn't grow up around all white people; I never wanted to gentrify hip-hop, I've never wanted to speak to an all-white audience.
When you see a fly flitting around your hair or your potato salad, you might see an annoyance. But in my lab, you really see a marvelous machine: arguably the most sophisticated flying device on the planet.
You can live your whole life in your brain and not experience what's around you. You go crazy that way.
There's no getting around it: Writing is hard, while working with young performers is nearly always a joy.
Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel.
In Bernie Sanders, I see a man saying that the emperor has no clothes while everyone around him insists they see clothes. Whether or not he makes it to the White House, I hope and pray that everyone hears the alarm he is sounding now; it may be the last voice we ever hear.
I want to prove to people who sit on a couch and don't do anything but criticize other people that, if you're a true athlete or martial artist, you're not old until you can't get up and walk around anymore.
In the early days, I was living with Dee Dee for a little while, and he was never around then, either. He would always be out. He was kind of an energetic guy who was always on the run.
I would be a giraffe because I just want to experience what a sore throat and being a giraffe feels like. It would be really uncomfortable walking around in the Sahara and being like, 'I really need, like, 15 lozenges for my giraffe body.'
I'm one of those guys who likes to piddle around in the garage and fix stuff.
So, I have my own horse and two ponies. I grew up around horses, and that really is my passion.
