Around the late 1990s, I'd become convinced that one of the killer applications of robotics came from connecting robots to the Internet. The idea of solving generalized artificial intelligence was still far away, but heck, I could rent brains by hiri...
I first came to cinema as a passionate filmgoer, when I was a child. Then, when I was a very young man, I became a film critic precisely because of my knowledge of cinema. I did better than others because of this. Then I moved on to screenwriting. I ...
Living in a community with very wounded people, I came to see that I had lived most of my life as a tightrope artist trying to walk on a high, thin cable from one tower to the other, always waiting for the applause when I had not fallen off and broke...
Movies are this thing that came into my life, and it still feels pretend in some way. I kind of do this thing, and I never really accepted this idea that I'm a film actor. That's what I do. I feel like I'm a theater actor that started doing films. Mo...
I was writing this really long joke about the smell of poop, and I was like, 'What am I doing with my life?' I started to think about why I was a comedian, and then I came up with a reason for existence, which is: inserting absurdity or stupidity int...
My agent and I try to be picky with roles so that I can drive my career in different directions and be different, creative characters. I want to be an actor for the rest of my life and to have fun with my career. So I told him that I wish I could do ...
I started out as a lawyer and came in laterally to Goldman Sachs. So I learned myself that life is unpredictable. That you really should, in terms of your career, try to be excellent at what you're doing. I think if you focus on your job, and you foc...
Forty-two years ago, I came to America from communist Cuba so I might have a better way of life, a freer way of life - a more democratic way of life. I wanted to live the American Dream where if you worked hard and put your mind to the task, anything...
I came to Southbury because I wanted to live a more simple life. When I was a child, I saw lots of movies about happy people living in Connecticut. And ever since then, that was where I wanted to live. I thought it would be like the movies. And it re...
I liked Edinburgh as a university in a way that I'd never enjoyed King's College London. I realised after I came to Edinburgh that perhaps it was a mistake to have gone to a college which was bang in the centre of a vast city. It had a bad effect on ...
People come to L.A. because they're chasing that dream of a better life. That's why I came here, because I thought it would be a place where I would find other people like me; people who wanted to write, people who had a dream of being something else...
Since puberty I've always had this strange awareness that all the keener experiences I would have in my life would happen later than it would to my contemporaries. When it came to the career thing, I never worried about it. It's better if you're stil...
Although in skating you compete with other people, anyone who achieves a certain level of success is first and foremost competing against themselves. And for me the idea that I could always do better, learn more, learn faster, is something that came ...
I could name a few songs and say exactly what summer they came out and what boy I thought I was in love with when I was fourteen years old, but I think that music used to be really more a part of the culture when people went out dancing in a differen...
I think that I was lucky that I was 30 when I did 'Love Story', which came with this extravagant pop celebrity. I had already done 15 years of what I call 'real' work.' I was a waitress, chambermaid, and a photographer's assistant, so I knew that I w...
And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before j...
Bolivia's majority Indian population was always excluded, politically oppressed and culturally alienated. Our national wealth, our raw materials, was plundered. Indios were once treated like animals here. In the 1930s and 40s, they were sprayed with ...
As an entrepreneur, I knew that if my company failed, I could always try again. So I often felt that the only real risk of true financial ruin came from the possibility of a serious illness that either exceeded my insurance plans lifetime limits, or ...
I used to send Tony Romo texts throughout the season just to encourage him, just to wish him luck and just to tell him to get on his offensive line. I hated watching this young man get sacked as much as he did, especially when it came down to big gam...
I really enjoyed the sort of real crazy, eclectic layering stuff and how it all worked together. I could tell it was some of it was derivative of something. I could tell that certain things were being looped around and I just really enjoyed the way t...
But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.
