Being a sci-fi geek myself and going to movies all my life, I came to the conclusion that there were really two camps of how robots have been designed. It's either the tin man, which is a human with metal skin, or it's an R2D2.
It's a shame how a lot of actors use theater as a stepping stone to film and television work; I think it shouldn't be treated that way. Maybe it's narcissism or something. I think we should always go back to it. I try and do a play a year, and I think that's really helped me.
This is the marketplace of political ideas. This is how America operates. It's a free market. It's free-wheeling. From the outside, it looks unpredictable. There's a circus-like free market.
I grew up believing that my parents helped change the world. I was so in awe of them, and I wondered how I could measure up. I mean, how do you change the world - again?
I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.
Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
No one can train you to be famous. How do you deal with the loss of anonymity, the loss of privacy? You have to be disciplined.
Why wouldn't - how couldn't - an author care about how his or her books look?
Fashion is constantly evolving throughout the seasons and within various cultural changes, but the one thing that has stayed constant is how I always want my style to be an authentic, intrinsic part of myself.
Whatever the opposite of regret is best describes how I've always felt about that decision - it opened me up to a million creative opportunities I needed to experience away from the bull and distorting mirrors that fame engenders.
I fell in love with singing, and through singing, I learned how to write songs. Anything you're consistent with and that you do all the time, you're gonna reap benefits off it at one point. You're not gonna get worse!
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
Can I tell you how strange it is to look in your rearview mirror and see guys in cars tailing you?
France, and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.
You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. It says it can't. It's extremely dangerous in that way.
What the Greeks and Romans considered myths, we consider fairy tales. We can see how very clearly the myths, which emanated from all cultures, had a huge influence on the development of the modern fairy tale.
I never played with a runner in my entire life, even in schools, because only I know where the ball is going and how hard, when I hit the ball, something my runner will never know about.
With 'Black Rain,' I spent a lot of time with homicide detectives, and I spent a lot of time with different brokers on 'Wall Street.' It helps get the rhythm of the piece and the tone, and how overplayed or underplayed it might be. That's also the magic of movies: You get to hang out and live these different lives.
We may forget, or be unaware of, how prevalent it is to be sexually traumatized by events that are generally not thought of as traumatizing.
We believe that more than 4 percent of the children in this country suffer ADHD... We want to know how to better identify and refer children for treatment.
I'm trying figuring out how to be the best person I can be. But it's been a process of trial and error.
If we don't have an informed electorate we don't have a democracy. So I don't care how people get the information, as long as they get it. I'm just doing it my particular way and I feel lucky I can do it the way I want to do it.
I made a few records here and there by default, but I wasn't ever comfortable in that role. I wasn't comfortable on stage. We'll see how it goes this time.
For me, just being how old I am, I know I don't want to be a single mom. I really would rather make it a two-person job. But I've also come to terms with not being a mother at all. I'm actually really good with either direction that my life can take as being a valid experience.
You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.
If I can't see the humor in it, how am I going to be funny?
Each job I had wasn't necessarily the perfect job, but I always talk to young women about how you really have to take certain things from each job and learn from that and then move on to something you really want to do.
This continuity of sound and form was something that I became really interested in from working with Ligeti. He was always going on about how form has to be continuous.
When the TV version of Annie came on, I was drawn to it. It was the struggle of this poor kid in this environment and how her life changed. It immediately resonated.
L.A. is such an exotic city to me, and it is just a big bubble. If you accept the bubble and accept how isolated it is. It can be a very creative place, and I find it easy to focus.
I wrote 'Soul Keeping' because we are taught more about how to care for our cars than how to steward our souls. But you cannot have an impactful life with an impoverished soul.
Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.
All those years of skating and dancing have carried over. I can't design anything without thinking of how a woman's body will look and move when she's wearing it.
I took a computer-science course to fill a prerequisite at Stanford, and I realized that every day was a new problem, and every day you got to think about how to solve something new, how to reason through something new, how to develop an algorithm to solve for something you hadn't worked on before.
Chimps don't have language. Humans actively instruct others about how things should be done. Chimpanzees probably pick up cultural traditions by observation.
It has always amazed me how tax cuts don't work until they take effect. Mr. Obama's experience with deferred tax rate increases will be the reverse. The economy will collapse in 2011.
