I got a phone call from Douglas Campbell and from Jerome Guthrie, who offered me a job out of the blue.
Beware of anyone who says they know. Trust me, they don't, or they wouldn't have to say they did.
I definitely had very strong male figures in my life, who, when I look back, clearly laid the foundations to who I am.
If I had a big brother who was a year older than me or something, I probably wouldn't have ended up being a filmmaker.
When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.
It was fairly obvious to anyone who studied the situation that China was dumping bedroom furniture in the U.S. to the detriment of our American workers and manufacturers to gain market access and share.
I know who I am as an artist and I know what my sound is, but I wanted to know what I could do in order to take it to that next level. So the experiences I had last year of moving to California and traveling to places like Rome and Nicaragua where I met a lot of people just had a really big impact in my life.
I run a bunch of charities and I say this line to people: 'I am somebody who has always been helped.' A little thing like that can make people believe it.
I don't want to just tell my story - I want to share the experiences, life lessons, and values that have shaped who I am and my ideas for the future.
You can't have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That's a recipe for disaster. And I don't mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office.
Heckles always vary. I mean, some people are just drunk, and it's nonsense, or, you know, some people just want to just repeat something I've said or add their own two cents about an opinion, but because of the nature of what I do and who I am, like, I also get the racist stuff, which is hard.
In general, I'm fascinated by women who exist outside of society's mores and values.
In the necessary memorialisation of the six million dead, there had been precious little attention paid to those who survived and how they survived.
Years ago, when my attempts at a writing career came to a complete stand-still, I applied to the Los Angeles Police Department. This might seem odd for a liberal woman who once went to UC Santa Cruz, but I've always had a powerful fascination with crime and serious interest in finding different ways to contend with it.
I have a huge span of fans, some who know all my radio songs and are familiar with my popular stuff and then some who have their own personal favorites. When I do my show, I try to take into consideration all those people.
More and more people are finally realizing that in the heart of America, there's all this incredible music that wasn't widely heard before because it wasn't in the interest of those who feel they have to control the taste of the wider public.
I was taught the truth will set you free... unless, of course, you want the truth about who killed JFK.
It's amazing to me that Glenn Beck can be on the cover of 'Time,' and there can be a whole article about him basically saying, 'Well, you know, he's controversial.' It's like, 'No, he's a dangerous idiot who needs the help of a good psychiatrist!'
The 'Story of Silent Night', which was given to me one Christmas when I was six - it was the story of a down and out composer who had no ideas left, and it was Christmas, and he came up with the hymn 'Silent Night.'
I want to have all that scientific information that we're building be used in designing the future so that people who make geographic decisions - and here it's not just land-use planners, but it's everyone: foresters, transportation engineers, people who buy a house - can analyze all of these information layers and design a future.
Anybody who finds it easy to make money on the horses is probably in the dog food business.
Big cities are chaotic. And chaos for humans - who have experience from their ancestors - is the last step before conflict. So, in the park, every kind of visual contradiction has been eliminated.
I've been playing music for over 20 years now. I started playing when I was 14 years old. To everyone who has said I was an overnight success... where have you been the last 20 years?
Most laws that we make to protect people from guns are usually ignored by the criminals and obeyed by the law-abiding people. And so I think that if you had better data, there'd be no one more in favor of it than law abiding gun owners because they don't want to be smeared and lumped in with the criminals who use guns.
We know that U.S. voters, and world leaders, allow Obama extraordinary leeway when it comes to deadly drone strikes, precisely because of his politics, character and background. (We are talking about a man, after all, who won the Nobel Peace Prize while ordering the automated killing of suspected Muslim terrorists around the world).
I've never been difficult to anybody or with anybody on a picture. Especially when you're in that nice status of hierarchy of actors and actresses who get to approve directors. Because once you make that choice, it's my belief that the director's boss.
Every day I have many choices to make about who I want to be.
It really does mean so much when your cast mates, who you respect so much, tell you that you made them laugh.
I wrote a novel called 'Blonde,' which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.
I have friends who are black whose families opened their arms to them when they came out; I have friends who were white where they were rejected.
Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what's happening on the free Internet is more akin to the 'crowdsourcing' of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them - only the search engines that parse their articles.
One of my mentors early on was Eli Harari, the founder of SanDisk, who happened to be a friend of my dad's.
I think one of the reasons I've had success in hip-hop is that I can bring out vulnerability in people who are generally seen as tough guys. To me, when a hip-hop musician always plays tough, I find it annoying because I know they're not really like that - there's something deeper and vulnerable. There has to be, because they're human beings.
Most observers understand the difference between a committed Christian who accepts Jesus as a model for living and a 'cultural Christian' who happens to live in a nation with a Christian heritage. Most Muslims do not.
There are directors who don't cast you for the way you act but for the way you are, the way you behave around the dinner table.
I come from a long line of people who express themselves through the dance. I come from a long line of people who create music through their feet.
