There are certain topics songwriters stay away from because it's hard to go there. I didn't sit down and go, 'I want to write something about my dad now.'
Math was always hard for me, but my dad would come up with ways of making it fun. I remember playing 'Number Munchers' on our old Mac... That counts as math class, right?
When I was fifteen years old, my dad won a video camera in a corporate golf tournament. I snatched it from his closet and began filming skateboard videos with my friends.
My children have been all over the world, and I think it's so good for them: expanding their horizons and imagination and seeing how other people live.
Sometimes I wake up, I feel like, I'm like 80-years-old.
I had this wild imagination. I was never me. All my childhood photos, I'm in fancy dress, playing a Russian refuge or Marvelous Mad Madam Mim.
Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What they both have in common though is that you must engage your imagination in the process.
Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.
It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.
Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.
I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.
I've learned that guns are exceptionally challenging to use effectively, with a power that must be respected. But mostly what I've learned is that they're a lot of fun, and dangerously appealing to an active imagination.
Bipolar disorder, manic depression, depression, black dog, whatever you want to call it, is inherent in our society. It's a product of stress and in my case over-work.
If we all looked out for each other a little bit more, I think we wouldn't have a lot of the crisis that we have in today's society.
What I really like about 'Red Band Society' is how real it is, and the experiences that they are going through are experiences that everyone is bound to go through at one point or another in their lives.
I do not want to see a society where, should I ever have any, my granddaughters have their fingernails pulled out because they are wearing nail varnish.
Sadly, in any industry and in any work-related environment, females always strive to achieve a certain amount of perfection, whether that be skinny or pretty. It's a constant, in our society.
I am still attracted to stories about people who are considered to be on the outside of society. I still seek inspiration from those stories.
Society is completely unreasonable. People want everything and want to pay for nothing. They panic if they think about their taxes being raised, but if their garbage collection is a day late they scream and yell.
But, actually, so many of the clerics that I've met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position i...
I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell's notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we're close to that.
