People have got to get together and work together. I'm tired of the kind of oppression that white people have inflicted on us and are still trying to inflict.
I work for two years on a book and it comes out and two days later I've got my first e-mail: When is the next one coming out?
I don't know any musician who got to the top without hard work. Take whoever you want. They all work bloody hard, harder than you think.
I got successful awfully quick, and I wanted it... But I do think there is responsibility to move the musical theater form forward. I think you always have to be aware of the work that came before and build on that.
You have to have a work ethic, and you have to be educated in what you're doing. You have to take it seriously. It doesn't mean that everything you do has to be serious. But you've got to have the tools.
You know, sometimes guys work with other guys because they're buddies off the track, not necessarily because they're buddies on the track. Sometimes you've got that going against you or for you.
That's where I got my start and where I'll continue to work, but I can't tell you the number of films between Drugstore Cowboy and Curly Sue that I auditioned for and wanted that didn't choose me.
When I work, I try to eat as much vegetarian as possible. When I do Cupid, I eat vegetarian because I need the energy. I've got those wings on my back.
I never had to say to myself, 'OK now, I've got to grow up and work for a bank, or go and sell real estate.' I never had to make that kind of break.
I'm one of the lucky few who never had to face the whole 'Oh, you've had a baby, and now work will have to suffer' bit. It just wasn't a big deal when I got married and had a baby.
You've got a lot of very, very smart people standing by waiting for somebody else to do the work. Not a recipe for long-term solvency in my opinion.
I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.
When you start to think about politicians, you've got to realize these are strange creatures. Other than the fact that they can't tell directions, and they have very strange breeding habits, how do you actually work with these things?
The perks of working in Japan are that you might go for two weeks every three or four months, so you do work an abbreviated schedule. But you really make up for the abbreviated schedule by how hard you have to fight, how much you've got to be in shap...
I remember when I got my first opportunity to work in America, I didn't speak a lot of English, so I only really knew my lines for the movie I was doing.
After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.
Any acting job that I ever got, I always treated it like I was a neophyte; I didn't know what I was doing, and I was going to work just as hard as I do on my stand-up.
In Korean, my lyrics are witty and have twists. But translated into English, it doesn't come over. I've tried writing in English, just for me, but it doesn't work. I've got to know everything about a culture, and I don't.
Brenda did some little vocal arrangements for us and she got to sing as well. So, we're happy to be able to work together and that's another reason why we look forward to doing more of these.
A few years ago, when I had no work and started believing that films weren't a viable career, I thought of finding another job. I started training and riding horses and got consumed by that. It was a boon in disguise.
I went to a psychotherapist for a year and a bit, and it was fantastic. I went in with a very clear question: I couldn't work out why I behaved in a certain way in certain situations, and I got that answered.
