I consider projects very deeply, but there's always a point in your life where there's a bit of randomity.
I'm not the sort of writer who can plan out things. Mostly I have no idea where I'm going.
I was driven when I was younger. Driven at West Point where it was much more competitive in that women were competing with men on many levels, and I was driven in the military and at Harvard, both competitive environments.
The sign of a good society is where talent is respected.
I was always active as a child. My dad tried to place me in every sport imaginable. I had so much energy, he wanted to push me in a direction where that energy was used appropriately to keep me out of trouble and focused while I was in school.
Creating any type of art is all about mood. I've been making extreme music in one fashion or another for decades. And truthfully, Down has a big enough fan base to where I could remain content to do only that, but music is a vast territory and I am an explorer. And I'm a lover of all things considered extreme in music.
But I love stand-up, and it's where I came from creatively, so it's something I never want to walk away from.
Sooner or later, directors in Germany will start casting without regard to where a person is from. It shouldn't matter anymore.
I convinced myself economic empowerment of women was going to be key, especially in a country like this where most women didn't go to school.
Surveys often show people would prefer a detached house with a lawn and driveway to an apartment. I understand this. It's not my place to presume to tell people where they can live. But perhaps that dream will simply not be possible in the future.
Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations - perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization.
The brain needs to have a story; it needs to have a logical screenplay telling where we're coming from and what we're going to.
Directing is a unique endeavor where you are in charge of so many people. As a writer, it is sort of the opposite.
Let us not return to the old battlefield where so many shed blood and tears for the right to vote. Instead let us move forward to an era where all eligible Americans have equal access to the ballot box and have the freedom to vote for the candidate of their choosing.
I was an overweight kid, and I went through a period where, oh my God, they were making cow sounds at me when I walked down the hallway and just humiliating me. Kids can be mean.
I think a lot of guys you see - there seems to be this thing where you can have all the fun in the world, but in the end of the day, there's no one to share it with.
Every life of a character is within a context. If I write detached from a social and political background, my story looks like a soap opera where everybody is indoors, not working and living off their emotions.
If you knew my life and understood where I came from, you would agree that Auntie Anne's, Inc. is a modern day business miracle.
I just hope that I continue to keep a line between my private life and who I play, even if they are closely intertwined, and so I'm careful. I don't even know where my line is, but I know I have a line.
Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.
When I work, obviously the material is the first and most important thing. Then the director and who I'll be working with. And then the location comes into it. Where is it shooting? Because I have a family that has to uproot to do that with me.
Tina Fey writes crazy, off-color, racist, hilarious stuff for '30 Rock,' but it's always funny because you're in this almost two-dimensional world where there's Jenna Maroney and these over-the-top characters. That's the framework.
Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion.
I think too often in films, people think endings are a summation of plot, and I don't like that. Because once you know where you're going as an audience member, then it's like a video game. You're just waiting for them to get through the levels and beat the bad guy. And I just think that's boring.
If you will be the best that you can be right where you are, God will promote you and give you more.
More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.
I thank God I'm in a position where I can pick and choose - there are some roles I don't play.
I'm loath to use my personal life to promote what I do, but at the same time, I don't like a journalist going away with no more than you could get off Wikipedia, where most of it's invented anyway.
To go from working with a group of people in a sketch-comedy show on a small network, where it was all about just creating funny stuff, to being on a network show, and the pressures of that, and getting to know the new people who were involved in it. There was a learning curve for me. But it was an education.
My main base is Monaco, and that's where I live most of the time.
I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command.
I'm a kid from Kansas, so J.C. Penney was where I got all my clothes from kindergarten to around 7th grade.
I use to live on this street when I was a kid where there was an old person retirement home, and all of the old people would listen to that band Herman's Hermits, and they would wear white nursing shoes. And they would throw away stacks of VHS tapes, and I would go through the trash and take them.
As a filmmaker, I believe in trying to make movies that invite the audience to be part of the film; in other words, there are some films where I'm just a spectator and am simply observing from the front seat. What I try to do is draw the audience into the film and have them participate in what's happening onscreen.
Me and my brothers started a musical group early on, and we were playing in places where we really weren't supposed to be.
The only reason I wound up in Nashville and went to Belmont University is because that's where I needed to be.
