There's only so much I can do to effect change - and really, the thing that I can do that's most effective is to work and to do good work. That, I feel, is speaking out in its own way.
When my mom ran for the Senate, my dad was there for her every step of the way. I can still hear her saying in her beautiful voice, 'Why should women have any less say than men, about the great decisions facing our nation?'
I'm an intensely competitive guy who is driven by the idea that accepting mediocrity or accepting defeat is not the way you succeed in life.
I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way.
If you're a classical actor, every Shakespearean part you play, you then say, 'McKellen did it this way,' and, 'Jacobi did it this way.' There's a whole list of Oliviers and people, whether you play Hamlet or Richard II or Richard III, any of those roles. And I found that a bit when I did 'La Cage.' It didn't bother me one bit.
I guess coming after 'Country Grammar' and everybody thinking, 'Well maybe, that was it.' To come back with something like 'Nellyville' and to have people accept it and appreciate it the way they did, that was a great move.
People won't buy insurance until they're sick. If you can call on your way to the hospital and get coverage, it's not really insurance at that point.
The best way we can encourage people to create companies that create jobs is to celebrate the diverse entrepreneurial stories and the variety of drivers that led these entrepreneurs to sticking their necks out.
I've never loved anybody the way I love my children.
I think the only way I could make something fun and big is if I don't expect it to be.
I went to Macalester in Minnesota to study social psychology, the study of why people do what they do. I was really looking at race, population, gender, and how we psychologically function in a way that affects our societal outcomes around those issues.
I've learnt that if you can't get rid of something, you have to find a way to live with it.
Life wasn't easy growing up; it was frustrating. If I had been a better reader, then that would have come easily, sports would have come easily, everything would have come easily, and I never would have realized that the way you get ahead in life is hard work.
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
It's hard sometimes, especially with a book like 'Scorch Trials,' to truly adapt to the way the book is because so many of the scenes that take place in the book are really graphed and painted for the imagination. Trying to bring that to life is a really big task.
Guys like Spielberg and Zemeckis and really anybody who is a storyteller-filmmaker today has studied Hitchcock and the way he visually tells a story. He was the master of suspense, certainly, but visually you would get a lot of information from what he would do with the camera and what he would allow you to see as the story was unfolding.
Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.
The only way you can raise the debt ceiling is to change the trajectory of spending - that's my personal preference. But I want the Ways and Means Committee to offer up a solution.
Creativity is not just for artists. It's for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.
I was familiar with 'Addicted' for a long time, even prior to the movie, way before it got the greenlight. And when it finally got the greenlight, I was very happy to be a part of it.
Since cable got the power and freedom it has, you can explore someone in a way you couldn't in the old days when Mannix was Mannix was Mannix. I thought maybe that Nixon would be an interesting series.
I definitely have the eye of the tiger. I've fought my way to where I am and will continue to do so. I'm a hard worker - I get it from my family. We only know work. Nothing was handed to us. When I believe in something, I go after it. It's very hard to tell me 'no.'
I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.
Whenever you have a character in which one of his defining qualities is his sexuality, it's always challenging, because you don't want to bring in someone who's going to play that in a phony way.
I went home one night and told my dad that an older kid was picking on me. My Dad, a Korean War vet and a Chicago cop for 30 years, told me, 'You better pick up a brick and hit him in the head.' That's when I thought, 'Wow, I'm going to have to start dealing with things in a different way.'
I'm a huge fan of a lot of different genres of music, and I really felt like somehow I had been pigeonholed a little bit - maybe of my own doing - and in a way where I felt like I was sort of falsely defined. What my music was being called wasn't really the music I was always listening to.
I was reading this story about these people who suffered from brain injuries, and then their behavior changed kind of drastically afterward, and I just said to myself, 'There's no way that that can possibly be true.'
Can't make your payments? No problem. The interest charges keep on coming. In fact, banks prefer it that way. More money for them. The government guarantees it.
I'm always looking for a sign - not in a spooky, supernatural way, but in a 'neurotic writer' kind of way.
A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.
I used to say that I didn't want anything to do with e-mail. It seemed really impersonal, complicated and weird. I had no idea what an amazing way it is to reach people.
I earn and pay my own way as a great many women do today.
When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.
It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'.
I get angry at myself for staying in relationships way too long.
The true greatness of a person, in my view, is evident in the way he or she treats those with whom courtesy and kindness are not required.
