Mostly, when I travel, I want to represent my own work well and let others know how I feel about poetry being an important part of life.
Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say.
Until I see an Arab country, a Muslim country, with a democracy, I won't understand how anyone can have a problem with how they're treated.
How terrible would it have been if I had come out with some watered-down version of who I am? People fell in love with the real me, and I still feel blessed that that was how the journey began.
If somebody from the past doesn't rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven't got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act - and that starts the plot in motion.
It's always bitterly disappointing to people to see how normally one can live.
As a father, I always want my son to be perfect. When he was young, I tried to train him in martial arts, but he said, 'I don't want to become like Bruce Lee's son, with everybody telling me how good my father was.' I just think my son is too lazy.
I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.
When you lose a couple of times, it makes you realize how difficult it is to win.
Nashville is the place where I first realized how impossible it is to look at someone and know what is inside them, what special something they possess.
My third hire when I came to Spotify was Tiffany Kumar, who came on as our global head of songwriter relations. The whole idea was to put our heads together and figure out how to build and contribute within the songwriting community.
LinkedIn's got a little progress bar. It wants you to do things like sign up 10 of your friends. It does that near the end. At the beginning it's like, 'You put in your name. 20 percent progress! How about some other information?' People want to fill in that progress bar. They like to complete a task. They like to check a box.
I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone's scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that's how I write.
I worry from the moment I take a job. I worry about how I'm going to do it, if I can do it... Then I walk on set and the director says, 'Roll', and all of a sudden, all of it disappears and it's all happening, and I relax, and I'm doing what I do, and I'm not even thinking about it.
There's so much attached to playing shortstop that you lose your concentration on hitting, unless you're a natural hitter. There's so much to think about in the field, you don't have time to think about what you did at the plate last time. 'How did he get me out?'
How does a band like System of a Down get big?
In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.
If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there's something wrong with my act.
Going out on a stage publicly and not knowing how people are going to react to you - once I experienced that, it made me feel much more comfortable about going into a scene.
I love guys who know how to dress. I love the motorcycle boots, and I love the skinnier jeans with jackets and scarves. Anybody who gets his clothes at All Saints, that's my guy.
How did I write 'Spin Me?' I listened to Luther Vandross's 'I Wanted Your Love.'
There's been so many different types of musicals, and it's a funny genre because there's a fine line between clever and stupid. It really takes a genius to know how to do it.
Entertainment is one of America's greatest exports. And the stories that we tell about people inform the world about how to think about people.
I think being very thin has had a lot to do with how I've been cast.
How does Ronnie O'Sullivan play snooker the way he does? You can't explain it.
I kind of push myself through my words and how I carry myself.
I think a guitar solo is how my emotion is most freely released, because verbal articulation isn't my strongest communication strength. My wife thinks that I should do interviews by listening to the questions and playing the answer on guitar.
Part of my advantage is that my strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people. That's how I started. I watched the stock market, how equities reacted to change in levels of economic activity, and I could understand how price signals worked and how to forecast them.
George Clooney is a super-human, he's just such an amazing human being, he taught me how to be a better person and a better actor!
Any place is good for eavesdropping, if you know how to eavesdrop.
It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.
The presidency is not an office job. If I only sit in the office in Dar es Salaam, I'm not running the country. I visit the country to inspect development programmes, to inspect activities, to see how things are going, how the government agenda is being implemented, what are the teething issues.
I wasn't obsessed by magic. People say, 'How you can you claim you practiced eight hours a day and weren't obsessed?' Well, people go to a job they don't even like for eight hours a day; it's not obsessive if it's something you like.
I don't have advice for people on how to dress. People should dress based on what they find beautiful. My best advice: Keep your clothes clean.
Google the name Prometheus, and see how often it has been given to innovations in many different fields, notably science, medicine and space exploration. The fire he stole can be seen, too, as the spark generating all artistic creativity.
It's so deeply disturbing to me that half of the eligible voters don't vote in this country. We talk about how divided the country is. The truth is, we don't even know. We just know what the half that voted thought.
