I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.
In America it's good to show people you are fine, you're healthy, you're sporty, you're happy to do things, to live. And in France it's more like you don't have to show you have success.
I'm not very good at sticking at things if I can't be successful at them. I gave up on sport a long time ago.
That's one of those things that will really hurt me personally, if I label a character or think about what it might do if it were to do well. I just try to do a good job with it.
Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.
When I joined Granada - which, you don't want to start crying about these things, but Granada was a very, very hot place to be, it was my good fortune to be there at that time - the BBC was firmly asleep.
The good thing about not being drop-dead gorgeous is that as time passes, I don't have much to worry about. I have friends who are actors and every day they look in the mirror with trepidation.
I often take things I find in vintage crawls and hand them to a very good seamstress, who then replicates them and makes a more robust version in different colors, with a pocket for my mic pack.
When I talk to teachers they tell me the things they'd most like from any government are a reduction in bureaucracy, support to help ensure good discipline and a reformed Ofsted.
It's our potential for good stuff I'm most interested in exploring, but that has most meaning when juxtaposed with things that can go wrong.
The closest person in the industry to me who is like a big brother is Tyrese. He gives me a lot of good advice. We both do the same things. We're both from the same background.
If you want to be good at something, you really have to work at it every single day. You have to work hard at the things that are hard. Otherwise you are just treading water.
I'm an investor in MakerBot, which is a good example of the 'thingiverse'. The idea of applying collaboration and rapid iteration to things that we interact with and hold in our hands every day is super revolutionary.
When I travel, I love speaking to women around the world about the things that inspire them, the fashions they like, what makes something good and what would make it even better.
Players would empty their souls to me; you cannot fathom the stories I've heard, everything from the good to the bad. I tried whatever I could to work things out.
I like to tell students, 'I didn't burst on to the literary scene.' I'm never good at things at the beginning. I was terrible at the start. I need to work and work.
Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.
It's very hard to adapt something. You end up changing it too much to make a good movie out of it. I prefer to work with things that are custom made for my kind of animation.
I think more money can be very detrimental to movies and TV because things get solved economically rather than creatively, and that's never a good solution.
Women have said the most malicious, disgusting things about me. But I know that when somebody comments about you, good or bad, it is 99 percent of the time their projection of how they feel about themselves.
The point came when people were doing things I didn't feel competent to do myself. I'm not being modest; I honestly get lost. I was lucky in spotting what I did when I did, but there comes a point where you realise what you're doing is not going to b...
