I had left school at 16, gone to stage school - and, until I was 22, I hadn't really played anyone but myself. Then in 1979, I made a film with Mike Leigh called 'Grownups,' which went out on the BBC, and overnight this new career opened up.
In bed at night, I could be reading some book, and I'll come across a sentence that's totally unrelated to some scene I did years ago. But I'll play the scene back in my mind and think, I did that wrong - I should've opened the door more slowly.
I remember him watching me through the crack of a door singing with a hairbrush. I was in front of his mirror. I think he wanted me to sing. He would get me on the table and make me sing sometimes or play the piano. He was very encouraging on that fr...
I've been in some situations where people have treated me like a fascinating toy. You know, it's just like an interesting kind of fun thing to have a play with. It's very weird for me. I feel like a tiny baby.
One day, when I was 33, I shifted. I suddenly saw acting as a higher calling. I understood that my goal was to serve the play. And I realized if an actor can make audiences' hearts resonate or make them question their values - that's an important thi...
O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.
I write in the mornings, two or three hours every day, and then at least four times a week I play in a duplicate game at a bridge club. I try to go to tournaments three, four, or five times a year.
It's very lucky to be able to do a job where I get to sit about writing plays all day and going to the theatre. The downside, I suppose, is that you put it out there, and people are invited to like it or loathe it.
When your entire brain is active, that means you are taking everything in through all sense perception. Your entire memory bank and your instincts are in play, so you make much quicker and more intelligent choices.
We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.
I loved 'Dungeons & Dragons.' Actually, not so much the actual playing as the creation of characters and the opportunity to roll twenty-sided dice. I loved those pouches of dice Dungeon Masters would trundle around, loved choosing what I was going to...
And here where the fact that we've given over half a billion dollars to New York really plays a role, because New York has already made a lot of investments in the kinds of things which you'd expect to have as basic security.
We adopted a focused strategy of core businesses in Citicorp that play to our unique historic strengths as a global bank that will provide strong growth and attractive returns over the long-term... And we've identified non-core assets we have shed.
That's what I've never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any day of the week; at least you can play chicken with him and know he'll stick to the rules.
When you are in the studio, you don't have anybody to feed off of; meanwhile, when you are playing live, you interact with people and you feel the energy in the room. When the crowd is going crazy, that definitely impacts your vocal performance. I pr...
A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.
When I was doing theater for all those years in New York, I did a lot of classical theater, wearing big corsets and big dresses and doing dialects. It's interesting that once I moved to TV, I'm playing these scrappy, contemporary toughies.
I was on a series for a number of years, and I got very used to only doing a mini-play per week. When I first came back to the theater, and I was suddenly doing eight shows a week again for three or four months, I had to find a new reason to do it.
I find it odd seeing a DJ playing to huge audiences. I know that people have been doing it for a while, but the fact that it's been embraced so much in America now and it's become like this new, big thing, I find it slightly odd.
Last tour my bass rig was breaking down every other night. That was a pain. We would get on stage and Trey would count off the song, and I'd play the first note and nothing would be there. Those guys would just roll their eyes.
I was always taught that the first rule of bunker play is to just get the ball out. When you have a steep face in front of you, this rule applies more than ever. Here, you have to get the ball up in the air as quickly as possible.
