Because of the success of 'Hamilton' and 'On Your Feet!' you can't hide behind the old argument of, 'It needs to be bankable, so we can't put all these people of color in the show.' We are bankable.
My mother was a dominant force in our family. And I always saw her as the leader. And that was great for me as a young woman, because I never saw that women had to be dominated by men.
I love to work. I know that sounds ridiculous to say because all people love to work, but I love the homework that goes into acting. I love figuring out different ways of playing a scene. I love the energy of being on set. I love not getting enough sleep because I have to wake up early in the morning.
When I'm dead, somebody can write my biography. I wrote a national hymn, an anthem, which I don't want to present to that country. But I have a deal with my wife - when I'm dead, she should offer it, because then I'm safe.
It's not okay to lie about people and particularly not okay to hurl the worst imaginable names at people just because you think you might not like their politics.
For my part, if the audience wanted to see Dracula again, I would be happy to reprise the role. It is an immortal character that can appear anywhere because it lies beyond time. Possibilities are endless.
'House of Balloons' was special because I had no deadlines, and nobody knew me, so there were no expectations. Spent a year making it perfect. Every song had at least, like, 7 different versions to them before picking the right one.
I picked economics at the end of my undergraduate time because it seemed to be a really nice combination of theory, including mathematical theory on one hand, and things that are quite practical that you can touch and see and feel. So I picked it, and I consciously thought of it as an experiment to see if I liked it. And it worked.
Because I was a kid from north of England, the only films I had access to was not alternative cinema, which in those days would be foreign cinema; I would be looking at all the Hollywood movies that arrived at my High Street.
There is a psychic gulf that exists between myself and my grandparents because they don't really speak English, and I don't speak Chinese, and that's my own personal shame because I did not learn, ever. I only saw my paternal grandma a few times in my life, and that's really crazy.
Because I've a track record of talking about books I never write, in Australia they think I'm about to write a book about Jane Austen. Something I said at some festival.
I always feel the danger because you might always be subject to an unexpected or emergency event.
Tell a man that he is putting on a stage performance in order to get what he wants, and he will irritably reject your observation. Why? Because most people go through life as cunning actors with a permanent horror of getting found out.
I love acting, but I am a mom, and the roles just weren't coming because of a mixture of things: because I'm not ambitious, and because I'm older, and I had a baby. I really felt like I had said a graceful and completely happy goodbye to acting in a significant way. And I had sort of made my peace with that.
I don't take myself seriously in the slightest, so it does amaze me that I've ended up being in all these very dark, sinister plays. But I love it because, touch wood, I'm lucky enough not to have that level of darkness in my life.
When I started acting, I hoped I could make some kind of positive contribution to this world. When I get a letter from some kid in Nebraska saying that, prior to Han, nobody wanted to be his friend because Asians weren't cool if they weren't into martial arts - Now he's accepted and recognized as a human being. That's pretty awesome, right?
I speak about family and adoption because it 100% changed my life and who I am. It definitely played a very large role into just learning how to be grateful for what you have and being fulfilled in a way that a lot of adopted kids don't feel.
History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.
We cannot afford to have the confidence of the public, victims, and witnesses in our justice system undermined because the wrong people are being found guilty and the real criminals are wandering the streets.
You can't start a movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day of shooting.
I'd been very certain about not wanting to do the acting thing because of my father. I thought I'd always have the father-son thing of 'He got you the part.'
You have a bout with death, things that touch your mortality, when that happens, all that bling-bling gets thrown away because all you've got is you and God.
I'm a great admirer of 'The Simpsons.' It's very surprising because it's backed by a right-wing television company in the U.S., and quite often it's poking fun at the people who would be its audience.
For myself, I've kind of always been interested in pets because they're not human.
I have one good girlfriend and then most of my friends are guys. Which I love, because they're just like so easygoing and I love to play like Xbox and just chill out when I'm not working, so boys are probably the way to go for me.
I love my cooking tools because I enjoy cooking - a Vitamix for smoothies and a rice cooker for steel-cut oats. I travel with a small rice cooker. I soak oats overnight, and when I get up, I just turn the rice cooker on, and it cooks the oats perfectly every time.
It's a lack of respect for the community when you're not willing to debate because it's the 'wrong' network.
The phenomenon of vampires has always appealed to me. Everyone kind of likes a vampire story because it almost could be true.
I'm married to a nurse, and she is really, really ardent that - in screenplays or movies that I've worked on, that all the medical aspects be properly presented. I think that filmmakers ought to be respectful of all fields and not just be lazy and put nonsense in movies because most people won't know the difference.
People always think that because of 'Dr. Quinn' that I just play nice family stuff. But the truth of the matter is that 'East of Eden' was a very successful thing for me in the past. I've played a lot of very evil people in my time.
I used to think that what scared me was the idea of being abandoned until someone said to me, 'Only children can be abandoned. Adults can't be abandoned because we have a choice. Children don't have a choice.'
Everyone seems to have this awareness of Charlie Chaplin because he was a really good businessman while Buster Keaton wasn't.
People throw in the towel because they don't know how to fight. You'd be surprised how much fight you have in you if you just do it.
If you're saving for the long run, it's actually a good thing when the market is down because the more shares you have, the more you can potentially make when markets rise. And over time - decades, not months - the markets rise more than they fall.
Why did they go to Hollywood? Because they could get access to the American financial sector. The Jews were neither authorized to be bankers or doctors nor lawyers or professors. That's why they concentrated on something new: cinema.
Being a pastor is pressure because we have to counsel people.
