Some people say that you should read people who think completely differently from you so that everything you read and everything that they say is a challenge to you but there's something to be said for reading people where you think, 'Yes, that's how I would have said it if I could have found the words for it'.
My dad's a doctor, and when I was 8, I went to one of his medical conferences where they were demonstrating laser surgery on a chicken. I was so mad that a chicken had to die, I never ate meat again.
I've never had a haircut where I've gone to a hair cutting place and they gave me an incorrect haircut. So I've been pretty lucky.
I'm used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there's a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you're doing to succeed is all right.
In my whole career, in fact, I can remember only two first nights when a show was at its peak on the first night. And I just wish we could devise a system where critics came not on a single evening but were given a choice of performances to attend.
I'm not running from any particular problems, I just want to take some time and figure out in my life where I can keep doing what I'm doing but in a way that I can also honor what I want to do for myself.
On any play where there's a scramble of 22 men, blindside hits and unprotected hits on knees occur.
I was born in London and raised in Rome until I was 4. Then we went back to London, where I went to school.
I actually got hurt in a steel factory in 1985 and so that changed my life. I went to a junior college and that's where I discovered acting.
What counts is what you do with your money, not where it came from.
Puerto Ricans who find they can no longer afford to keep their pets often choose to drop their dogs, sometimes even whole litters of puppies, at a beach - sometimes under cover of night, in secret - rather than surrender the animal to a city or state-run shelter where the animals will face grim conditions and almost certain death by euthanasia.
Actors on stage, you can go from playing a myriad of roles, from Shakespeare to a Eugene O'Neil drama, and it's the norm. I came up in a world where you're supposed to be able to do three things very well. Act, sing, dance, paint, do something. The emphasis was on versatility.
I wanted to develop a guitar style where phrases and lines get there just in the nick of time, like with Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper. Subtleties mean so much, and there is a stunning beauty in them.
WWE is a space where I thrived, and I loved, and I still do. I love connecting with an audience; that is the greatest thing about going back to WWE.
If you have music you want to play that no one asks you to play, you have to go out and find where you can play it. It's called do or die.
Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences - and it happens all the time - where for some reason the energy doesn't connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.
Sometimes sushi is just superb, and other times there's nothing like a great big steak. It depends where your taste buds are at the time.
If the day comes where I can have my own action figure... I defy any actor to say that's not a good day.
There can be no great courage where there is no confidence or assurance, and half the battle is in the conviction that we can do what we undertake.
I think President Obama is trying to deceive the public in pretending that he was not a part of Congress that has made some decisions in the past that got us to where we are today.
If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.
It's rural America. It's where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America.
The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it's much, much more diluted.
With indies, all they have is their script and it's very important to them. The characters are better drawn, the stories more precise and the experience greater than with studio films where sometimes they fill in the script as they're shooting.
When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.
I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.
I think we're going to start to see a new model of civic advocacy where people get together once in a while to protest, but it's more about an ongoing, sustained engagement in issues, networks and communities about which people care.
I had a stormy graduate career, where every week we would have a shouting match. I kept doing deals where I would say, 'Okay, let me do neural nets for another six months, and I will prove to you they work.' At the end of the six months, I would say, 'Yeah, but I am almost there. Give me another six months.'
At this stage of my life, I've dedicated myself to playing what I want to play, how I want to play it for the rest of my time. Regardless of whether one might like it or one might not like it, this is where I am.
A lot of times on tour it's about, 'OK, where am I today? Wow, I'm in Costa Rica. What is their famous dish?' And it's about trying the food, and really experiencing it.
I was born and raised on a farm, where boys had chores and girls did not, i.e., drive tractors, bale hay, take care of cattle.
So many people get involved with carrying grudges and having these moral battles with people, where they cast themselves as the righteous and the other guy is the dirtbag. They waste tons of energy on it, create all kinds of darkness around themselves and the other person. It gets you nothing.
We have it, we're lucky enough that we've created a show where it's not about... a family, or a kid, it's about a town.
Contractions, 'U' for 'you' and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient - but we wouldn't want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. Where would all the fun go?
A lot of people think pitchers, and they just think throwing and that's where all the power comes from. It's really not. It starts from the ground up. If you have a strong base, the legs will actually do the work and build all the torque and power you need to throw. So if you have weak legs at the end of the year, that's not good.
