The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It's limiting.
When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
It is extraordinarily difficult, even in academia, to find a job that will let you do whatever you want with your time. If you are determined to spend your time following your own interests, you pretty much have to do it on your own.
It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.
When I first got out of school, I went on a children's theater tour, and I went around the country a little bit that fall, and it was the first time I went to Chicago. We spend a couple of days in Chicago, and I was really struck viscerally by the ci...
I wish records got made faster and looser with less thought in them, but since touring is so much more profitable than records, you spend so much time on the road that it's hard to work on them. And the records get further and further apart.
I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first.
Little white lies are told by humans all the time. Indeed, lying is often how we get through each day in a happy little bubble. We spend time and energy rationalizing our own behaviors, beliefs and decision-making processes.
Of course, nobody's tearing my door down. If you're successful you're going to intimidate and scare off the people you'd like to spend time with. They're not going to approach you. And the ones who do are often there because you are a celebrity.
Since we travel a lot as a team, I spend a lot of time on a plane where I like to play 'Football Manager.' I have been a soccer fan since I was 5 years old, so to be able to manage soccer teams is a lot of fun.
We're all products of what we want to project to the world. Even people who don't spend any time, or think they don't, on preparing themselves for the world out there - I think that ultimately they have for their whole lives groomed themselves to be ...
I'm constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I'm doing, and I will spend enormous amounts of time looking at manuscripts and asking questions, and people will say, 'I know what his next book is about.'
If you want to write about people, you can make it up. But if you spend time talking to someone and examining what it is you want to write about, you discover a level of detail that you wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
A lot of people thought I wasn't doing anything because I was spending a lot of time socialising and going out, but I've always managed to get work actually done.
Early on in my career, I'd go into the makeup trailer, and they'd spend an hour doing my makeup, and I would hate it. I'd go into the bathroom, wash it off and start over again, which took an enormous amount of time. So I just started doing it myself...
With a pilot, there's a lot of information that gets packed into 46 minutes or whatever it is. Usually what happens is that, throughout the season, you get to spend a little more quality time with the characters and get to know them a bit better, whe...
I don't remember a time when I wasn't acting. I have taken time off to figure out if it's what I really want to do, and it is. The only other job I'd want is to be a psychologist, as I spend most of my time analyzing people and emotions.
I'd work to make it hip again to spend time in our fabled and fabulous land. But with a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother, I would probably be better suited as mayor of New York.
I spend a lot of time preparing. I think a lot about what I want to do. I have prep books, little notebooks in which I write everything down before a sitting. Otherwise I would forget my ideas.
You read about poor people having Botox go wrong and you think: 'Well, what the bloody hell were you doing?' Why would you inject yourself with poison? And why are we spending so much time looking at ourselves? I just don't get it.
