I guess some people are brilliant enough to be brilliant on their own and never doubt anything and come up with fabulous things. But I think it's good to get into arguments with people and have them say, 'That sucks' or 'You're crazy' or 'That's chee...
At my first job as an independent researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, they told me I could work on most anything, but not what I knew something about. That is actually very good advice to a young person starting a career because you bring new ideas...
A lot of the time I hate acting. It has a lot to do with the way I was brought up in a world where showing your emotions is frowned upon. It's just not manly. I don't do anything in life because I love doing it. It's because I want to be good at it.
Before GoPro, if you wanted to have any footage of yourself doing anything, whether it's video or photo, you not only needed a camera, you needed another human being. And if you wanted the footage to be good, you needed that other human being to have...
Bill Mitchell said he really liked it. But when he asked the other four their opinions, we all took one look at ourselves in our raggedy long winter coats and cracked up. We knew we weren't likely to tempt anyone or anything, but what the hell, it wa...
You never hear about a pit bull doing anything good in the media. And they have a stigma to them... and, in many ways, pit bulls are like young African-American males. Whenever you see us in the news, it's for getting shot and killed or shooting and ...
I moved to L.A., and people said that I would never find work, that I would never find good friends, and I feel like I was fortunate enough to find the work, but it wouldn't mean anything unless I had a group of people who could appreciate it.
I don't think I'll be remembered in a big Michael Jackson, Led Zeppelin way. I think I'll be remembered in this way: by the people who were there, who can't capture or explain it. I'm not trying to brag or anything. It's not about me. It's about faci...
I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don't think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.
I told everyone I would never be an actor. People used to tell me, 'Hey, you got a good look. You should try.' And I was like, 'Nah. That's not me.' And then, the moment I tried it, I found I loved it more than anything in the world, and that taught ...
I like the laid-back ladies. Looks are stressed so much these days, and a lot of girls feel they need to do all of these weird and wonderful things to look good, and they really don't. The best-looking girls don't do anything; they just sort of know ...
The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you ...
I hear all the time that boys don't like stories about girls. Which never made much sense to me. Wasn't 'Terminator' about a girl? And 'Alien'? Hell, I grew up on 'The Wizard of Oz.' People enjoy stories about anything if they're good stories.
I'm very happy with my life. I am what I am. I don't worry about anything that I can't control. That's a really good lesson in life.
My mother, she didn't believe in praise. She'd never say anything was great. I think that's quite Northern, to not make people feel too good. I didn't mind if she was proud of me or not, it didn't bother me. I was never trying to please her.
I've been having these dinner parties at my house in L.A. for years that turn into charades parties. I'm so good at breaking stuff down into syllables and sounds. If I were to be doing anything else besides being an actor, I would be a professional c...
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a bank being big. In fact, there are some good arguments about universality of geography that in theory, if you have all your eggs in one little community, and some big employer goes out, that coul...
I do not understand where the backing of Bitcoin is coming from. There is no fundamental issue of capabilities of repaying it in anything which is universally acceptable, which is either intrinsic value of the currency or the credit or trust of the i...
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rul...
The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't as...
Canadians know that the promise of a recession didn't happen because of anything we did here. If you look at all the causes of the recession, problems in mortgage markets, the problems in the banking sector, the problems in government finance in coun...
