If you're playing a good guy, you show some darkness. If you're playing a dark guy, you show something different, like humor, that will mix it up and hopefully surpass the audience's expectations. What I'm battling all the time is complacency in the ...
I really loved animals when I was little - my friend and I had an imaginary vet's office; we would mime doing surgery on animals. We treated more injuries than illnesses - fixing with a baby bear with a broken leg, removing a tumor. Of course, our su...
I know better than anyone else that my time is near. I've had a good life, and you don't stop and complain at this stage of the game. I've made some mistakes, and I'd like to stay around a little longer and overcome them, but there isn't time. I'll m...
We're good at taking care of little kids, and spend a lot of energy teaching them things like how to read. But when kids get as tall as their parents and can look them in the eyes, we tend to drop the ball - at a time they most need a loving consiste...
Shakespeare is renewed each time you see it or read it. I've seen 'Midsummer Night's Dream' so many times, and each time it's a little different, or a different line leaps out at me. It's like re-reading a good book over and over, always noticing som...
When I've got all the makeup on and all the spit, polish and glue together, I look fine. But I know what I really look like, and I'm still that same little kid under there. I don't think I look that great. I think I did a good job of creating Morgan ...
I don't think I will ever write about politics or foreign policy. I feel like there is so much good writing in those areas that I have little to add. I also like to steer clear of writing about people whom I do not personally like.
Any time you can take a book a little beyond the realm of pure entertainment, I think it's a good thing. But I don't really have it on my to-do list when I write a book. It just evolves naturally during the process of immersing yourself in a subject.
I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I...
The typical big Japanese company has somewhere between a third and 40 percent of its revenues coming from developing countries, and about a third of Japan's exports are also to the emerging countries, so in a strange way, Japan, which has very little...
Edgar Degas's famous sculpture, 'Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,' served as my muse for 'The Painted Girls.' I came upon a television documentary on the work, and as someone who held the sculpture in high esteem and who largely considered ballet to be t...
The moment I was introduced to my wife, Emma, at a party I thought, here she is - and 20 minutes later I told her she ought to marry me. She thought I was as mad as a rat. She wouldn't even give me her telephone number - and she wrote in her diary: '...
What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank...
Perhaps nothing helps us make the movement from our little selves to a larger world than remembering God in gratitude. Such a perspective puts God in view in all of life, not just in the moments we set aside for worship or spiritual disciplines. Not ...
I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thi...
The fact that television and tourism have made the whole world accessible has created the illusion that we enjoy intimate knowledge of other places, when we barely scratch their surface. For the vast majority, the knowledge of Thailand or Sri Lanka a...
People ask me, 'What happened in your life that might have pushed you as an artist to get to where you are today?' I always felt a little on the outside. And as such, you're always observing things. So, I'd be kind of re-creating these things in my m...
A lot of these girls have a goal in life to find a rich guy. I can smell it from a mile away. They won't catch me! I know what they look like. They come with their little Kelly bag and their Rolex and the Louboutin shoes that are slightly too sexy. S...
During most of my life, my contact with Jews and Judaism was slight. I gave little thought to their problems, save in asking myself, from time to time, whether we were showing by our lives due appreciation of the opportunities which this hospitable c...
I had been drawing my weekly comic strip, 'Life in Hell,' for about five years when I got a call from Jim Brooks, who was developing 'The Tracey Ullman Show' for the brand-new Fox network. He wanted me to come in and pitch an idea for doing little ca...
The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my ...
