Just the circumstances of being in D.C., people give you books, and there are issues you want to learn more about, so you are tearing into as many as you can.
Never has the political class or the mainstream media that covers them been more out of touch with the American people than they are today.
People end up fleeing countries who adopt economic policies based on these flawed principles. And more often than not, they come here.
It irritates me so much the way people talk about soaps because it is far more difficult working on a soap than it is on a big studio film.
One of the things about writing fiction is that you create people that you feel, more or less, as though you know.
Public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation.
And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things.
I grew up with lots of animals and I related more to them than I did to people. I feel a lot of empathy for them.
We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.
You feel this pressure that people will take you more seriously if you play guitar, but I've decided I'm a singer and that's enough.
They say 6 million people see you when you act in a film; it may only be 600 in a play. But the effect on the 600 may be truer and more lasting.
If Iran does not change its policies, it won't be able to integrate into the international community and will become even more isolated than it is now, which likely will have a negative impact on the Iranian people.
Even if somebody in your family is successful, it doesn't change anything. On the contrary, I suppose people expect more of you in certain ways.
As you get older, you realize just figuring out how to be nice to the people in your personal sphere is almost more challenging than trying to change the bigger culture.
What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.
The best design work is really done when you spend more time with people, when you have the opportunity to be of the same mindset and the same incentives as the founder of the business.
I am very proud of this work because it is more about the meaning of the Easter Rising and its relationship to what this whole century has been about, people liberating themselves, freeing themselves.
I think they are paying a lot more attention to news now, by the way, in part because of national-security issues. A lot of young people have friends or family in the military today.
Things happen to everybody in the course of a lifetime. Relationships end, people die, tragedy befalls everyone. So everyone has this wealth of experience, and the older you are the more you have to draw on.
One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.
