It's impossible for me to play a part without thinking about the audience.
Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving on the road at night I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.
I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people. Unsavory guys. I think it's my face, the way I look.
It's very bizarre though when you get hired and then the director will say, "I know how this goes." And you're thinking, "Wait a minute, I thought that I was doing this" but basically what they really want, especially if they wrote it, is they want you to do it as they imagined it. It's virtually impossible.
As Dante says in the beginning of the Inferno, 'In the midst of life's journey I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost.' I think we're all doing that, in our various ways Looking for our Selves in the dark wood. I hope you find yourself on your journey.
You can do anything you think you can.
You play the hand you're dealt. I think the game's worthwhile.
I'm talking about when you're nearer the end of your life than the beginning. Now what do you think you think about then? The future? In the future I'm going to do this? Become that? What future? No. What you think is, 'How will I be regarded in the end?'
No one awakens in the morning thinking they will die that day. Not a saint or a sinner. Not even a condemned killer. We all know were mortal, and yet we all believe we'll live forever.
I try to make the writing as regular and regimented as possible. I usually get up at around 5 a.m. and read what I wrote the day before. Some of the time, after I read, I think the writing's very good and some of the time I feel embarrassed by what I've written. You have to learn not to pay too much attention to these feelings.
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
I think Chris Rock at the Oscars was a great example. I thought that was intellectually hilarious. The Gap starts a war with Banana Republic... That to me was funny.
Endurance, after all, is the only reason we even exist. We think of ourselves as nature's deadliest animals, but the truth is, a naked human is the biggest wimp in the wild. We have no fangs, no claws, no strength, and no speed.
If a martian were to land on earth now and be told that the best batsman in the world was playing in this match, he would think it was Rahul Dravid and not Sachin Tendulkar.
I think Jeremiah is for our times. But whether the church in the west will listen to the Word of God today any more than in the chaos of 7th century BC middle east... Only God knows.
If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.
The Iranian people were converted to Islam not very much longer after the conquest of the Arab world by Islam, but they refused to adopt the Arabic language, and it's a great point of pride to them that Persian culture and the Persian language and Persian literature survived the conversion to Islam. And the conversion to Islam also was for most of them not the Sunni majority form, but the Shia one. So there's a great discrepancy between Iranian society and many other of what we think of as Arab Muslim States and systems.
No one who knows my personal situation would think I am not sympathetic to the needs of the active forces.
I always wondered if I was supposed to be excellent at something or not. I think, because of that, I have a lot of insecurities about myself.
If I really think about what drove me from the beginning to become a designer, it is really the idea of trying to make everyday life a little bit better - to make it more functional, more desirable, to improve quality of life somehow.
There's so many ways to become a spiritual person and that's why a lot of people do drugs is that they're looking for something more and they're not satisfied. Even if they don't know their spirituality, they're searching for something more and they find it or they think they do with drugs, and that's what I thought for a long time.
Men might be chastised for being promiscuous, but I think they're more likely to be given a pass, due to a "men will be men" attitude that still prevails in the Western world. They don't usually experience anything like the virulent shaming and verbal abuse that women who are sexually adventurous are sometimes prone to experiencing.
I think it's ill-advised to attribute pathologies to healthy people. It doesn't help normal, healthy, thriving children to be viewed as pitiable and fragile.
I think maintaining relationships with my friends, my mother, my manager, they're all important.
People who see an unhappy, sulky pop star assume that she's an ungrateful, self-absorbed little ninny. But nobody knows what's really going on. I need to eat, I need to sleep, and sometimes those things weren't considered. It was like, "When do you think I'll have time to go to the bathroom?" That wasn't on the schedule.
