It would drive me crazy if I picked roles with the goal of being a leading man. You never know what you're getting into when you sign onto a project, and more times than not, the characters that are close to the leading man are more interesting and m...
There's something really interesting about having those close friends that you've had incredible times with but growing up and away from them. The underlying tensions, the shifting in the group dynamic, the little lies you tell to big yourself up: it...
I believe our foreign assistance should be scrutinized, should be debated, and that we should strike the right balance, but in all cases the foreign assistance that we provide around the world should be used to further our national security interests...
It wasn't on my agenda, but the thing about getting important awards is it makes the adventure of your career have a little more possibility. I think just what's happened so far is already making the opportunities more interesting, even though I'm at...
But she was finding it increasingly easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and if it was remotely possible that any godlike being who could order the disposition of particles at the creation of the Universe would also be interested in directin...
The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.
I think American interests are served when there are sections of the world that have representative governments, politically open economic systems, and are willing to take a stand against some of the more extreme ideologies that there are around the ...
For me to go back and to play for audiences some of whom have been following me for thirty years and some who have found me in the last five or six years, that's really an interesting thing. I have an audience that goes from kids to seventy year olds...
On the Internet, news is consumed a la carte. If someone shows up on the main page of a website and doesn't see anything of interest, they leave. This negatively impacts ad revenues. The solution on the Internet is to pack news websites full of thing...
All of us have a bit of a sociopath inside of us, and it's wrong to think that somebody is just clearly sociopathic, because they're not. It's interesting to explore the shadings and nuances within a person. Those feelings exist within more human bei...
I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines. So I'm interested in a resistance to that: What we can bend, what we can break.
You have to have a certain single-mindedness if you want to reach the top of the profession, and I'm not sure if I've got that cold-eyed egomania that perhaps is needed to get to the top. So as long as I can keep paying the mortgage and keep myself i...
The most interesting people are the unusual. No one writes about or discusses the average, the ordinary, or the common; they write about and discuss the weird, the mad and the different, so if you are one, even though the opinions of others are of no...
Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new.
It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'
I think shrinks are interesting to write about because you get to see what the character chooses to reveal, and what behaviors or stances the character tries out on the shrink that might not be part of the character's make-up outside of that room. It...
John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.
In order to describe a particular subculture, you might want to portray people who are typical or representative of that subculture; but to dramatize it, to make it an interesting setting for a story, you want to bring someone anomalous into that set...
I find infidelity interesting because it's so revelatory about people. It's this really silent thing. Everyone acknowledges it as a general practice, but nobody likes to go beyond that, to get down to the nitty-gritty.
Independent documentary isn't beholden to some of the interests that the mainstream media are influenced by. It's a pathway to renegade, independent reporting in an in-depth, investigative fashion, and it can do so with a compassionate lens; it allow...
When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.
