On the whole, when the unexpected danger happens to you, you're thinking so fast, you're thinking so hard, every bit of you is alive to 'What should I do?' 'What can I do?' There isn't a lot of time for contemplation.
My experience tells me that any time you hear people laughing on a sitcom, it's the writers who happen to be closest to the microphones - not the audience.
People always think I'm so calm and ethereal. But my family certainly doesn't feel that way all the time. They tease me about it.
The Spartans were a paradoxical people. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy.
Studios are an assembly line. They can be a very good assembly line. As a producer, you concentrate on one project at a time. As an executive, you're in charge of a slate.
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band - or at least in a Pixies cover band.
The right way to deal with a budget problem that was years in the making is by formulating a credible plan to reduce the deficit over time and as the economy is able to withstand the necessary fiscal belt-tightening. That is what President Obama is doing.
Comedy and politics have a lot in common. Both are great ways to pick up chicks - just look at Governor Spitzer. Or Ellen Degeneres. Both require spending time on the road meeting strangers who often have the desire to throw things at you. Both are difficult, if not impossible, to do all alone. And both rely heavily on personality.
I spent a lot of time with my teams, especially in the East Coast teams, talking about dealing with the elements a lot of time, and a lot of instruction about field position and those kind of things. I like that variable.
I'm trying to fight typecasting as hard as I can, while I have time.
You're under tremendous pressure, and everyone needs you to be perfect all the time, and that often creates a perverse incentive to not tell the truth. Please remember - when you get caught not telling the truth, it's over.
I did spend a lot of time as a child very confused about whether I had a devil in me, or whether I was in a state of grace. I mean, these ideas are so potent to anybody with half an imagination.
This is so dumb - once time I spray-tanned before a race, and I didn't shower, and I sweated the whole thing off on my car. It was so bad, I told a fan I would never do it again.
Because kids are physically smaller, there's an assumption by people who haven't read a kids' book for a long time that their ideas and themes and problems and ambitions must be commensurately smaller and less important. I would venture that sometimes the opposite is true.
Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.
That young people don't have valid thoughts about the world because they haven't been alive long enough is sadly a very popular and, frankly, unoriginal sentiment. When I think about that time, I was just responding to the world around me.
A guy and a girl can be just friends, but at one point or another, they will fall for each other... maybe temporarily, maybe at the wrong time, maybe too late, or maybe forever.
So many great movements didn't succeed the first time, but people kept trying and trying and trying.
So now is the time, more than ever, for those who truly value all the principles of democracy, especially including dissent, to be the most forceful in speaking up, standing up and speaking out.
The problem with being in the public eye for a long time is there are 20 years worth of looks to come back and haunt you!
I lived in London for a time in the '90s and I love it here. You know, I just go and see shows and have great dinners and walk around.
I've seen, all too often in my career, people coming in to lead agencies and organizations and trying to impose change from the top down. Never works. You never have enough time.
In a movie, that's the only time when you're allowed these kind of fantasies to be lived. Being able to look so cool and be able to fight five bad guys and take them down. When can you do that?
I'm not the kind of writer that can write eight hours a day... I'm the kind of writer that the more time I have, the less efficient I am.
When I'm writing, I spend all my time in The Grocer on Elgin buying ready-made meals; I think they are the only reason my husband and kids haven't left me.
Being a parent means my time use has to be a bit more focused, but it also gives me a new non-writing dimension to my life, which is a healthy thing. I can't wander along for weeks with an idea drifting through my head - I have someone who will drag me back into life, and that's a good thing.
You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well.
Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.
I always wanted to run a major label, and I feel like I got the skills to do that. The one thing about me is that I won't sit behind a desk the whole time - I'll go to the clubs and see what's hot.
At school, I'd refuse to take part in biology lessons when animals were being dissected. One time, the teacher announced that we would be gassing worms. So I ran around the room, gathered up all the worms and set them free in the fields. I just loved animals and couldn't bear the thought of them suffering.
I've been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at 'This American Life,' it's how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying.
As you grow older, you learn a few things. One of them is to actually take the time you've allotted for vacation.
I don't have the time to design my own costumes, but I do give suggestions and style tips.
Sometimes when the song is right for that time period, it's just kinda bad to let it wait, and then when you do release it eight months down the road, it's not the same.
The thing about working in Hollywood is that, at some point, you really get tired of hearing how godless you are, and how if you and the rest of the heathens in Tinsel town would put more God-centric shows on TV, people wouldn't be abandoning prime time in favor of their Bible study classes.
