When things don't come so naturally to you, you want to persevere, you want to keep pushing yourself to overcome obstacles that prevent you from having the kind of life that you want to have.
When I was younger I probably didn't understand something basic about tact, but I think it kept faint-hearted people at arm's distance and that's not such a bad thing, because life is short and I know the kind of people I want to work with.
We were both very much the same. We were both very impulsive. We both loved life. We both loved shopping. We both had a love of clothes, obviously, because he was the designer that I kind of wore forever and ever.
'Joy' to me is a reflection of the life experiences that I've had throughout the first record and kind of having some time and a hiatus. It's just like all of those experiences that I had during that period - that growing up period.
I never consciously said, 'I want to be an actor.' It sounds stupid, but it's kind of like being a painter or something. You don't say, 'From today on I'm going to be a painter.' It's not something conscious - you've just been painting pictures all y...
The truth about people at every economic level of life is you get those who are kind and who are not, those who are greedy, whether they be rich or poor. That's a common thread through humanity on any street you go to.
The United Nations should come in and take over Liberia, not temporarily, but for life. To make Liberians believe in democracy, to make us believe in human rights, they need to go in and just seize control of the country. That is the only way Liberia...
What's interesting is often people think life changes when you have a record deal and you do all kinds of stuff. Obviously your life changes, but nothing changes your life like getting married and having kids.
Of course, it gave the studio an enormous power, because I don't know any other place who had that skill with images to communicate with. And the need of these kinds of images are even greater now than they ever were because we are losing our life sy...
My songs form a kind of biography or diary of my life as they are about people I have loved and people I only knew in my heart, places I have seen only for a moment and places I have lived all my life.
I know people who have written big hit country songs that are really kind of terrible songs, but for the rest of their life, they're the guy who wrote that. You've got to be careful; if you don't want that to happen, don't write those songs.
More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.
Although I'm perceived as very optimistic and upbeat, it comes out of being the opposite of that - feeling isolated or lonely, looking for meaning and the kinds of things that ease that suffering in life, and finding them in large-scale social intera...
Justified or not, the Supreme Court has a kind of sacred status in American life. For whatever reason, Presidents can safely run against Congress, and vice versa, but I think there is an inherent popular aversion to assaults on the court itself. Perh...
Any kind of blockage is heart disease; when you have a blood clot anywhere, that's heart disease. When Wilt Chamberlain died, strongest man I ever met in my life, I started paying attention.
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
Partying and having all of those pictures taken distracts from the work that I do. It's not why I started acting. I didn't get into acting to be written about. It kind of just happened - so I accept that it's my life.
I curate my life in a way. It's always playing on my mind, kind of a love-hate relationship. I'm not one of those people who's, like, 'I wish Facebook wasn't around,' because, you know, it is what it is.
You see that the people who are drawn to alternative medicine are often fairly healthy and they go to alternative medicine for what I call the 'symptoms of life.' Fatigue, joint pains, inability to concentrate, perhaps, the kinds of things that anyon...
Lisa understands me. I'm very complex, but I have trouble opening up to people. I tend to keep things to myself. All my life, I've been kind of shy - opening up is always a challenge and Lisa can understand that.
I do believe everyone on this earth is an artist - some people more than others. But I do believe we are all artists in a certain way. We all have unique abilities. There are people who are meant to make it their life, and that is a different kind of...
