The writers that I aspire to, like Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman, they'll tell you that the work gets harder, not easier. And they set that bar for us where we're always striving to do something better than the last time, whether it's the next song ...
Rehearsals are set up so that you find out all the nuances about your character. You never want to beat yourself up. It's about finding the right direction, and most of the time, the right direction is not what you think is the right direction. That'...
I grew up on the south side of Chicago, most of that time on welfare. My mother and sister and I used to live with my grandparents and various cousins. We shared a two-bedroom tenement, and the three of us slept in one of those bedrooms and had a set...
I can be working on a collection and a film at the same time. It can take a lot out of me, but the processes come from the same source. From a brief I set myself I can make a film, I can make a collection, I can make an installation.
I lived in America for a long time before I started working as an actor. Some actors show up on set and have never done an American accent before, so they rely on a slew of technical mechanisms. Part of what makes an accent is understanding why peopl...
I set the bar high because I don't want to do just any other show just to keep working. I want to do something special that means something to people and speaks to them. Those kinds of opportunities don't come along all the time!
When you're on TV, you're looking at a half-page of material, trying to memorize it really quickly. By the time it's on TV, I've already forgotten what I said, but I can still recite my whole role from Shakespeare in the Park. It works a different se...
When I first set up my big band, I only had Gilson Lavis, the drummer from Squeeze, with me. He was the core element. Whenever a group hits the big time, they always get a new drummer because they really need that. You can make do with rubbish elsewh...
Being on set is a hard thing. A lot of people are like, 'Oh, you get to make a movie, and it's all fun.' But the reality is, it's a lot of hours. It's a lot of reshoots; it's a lot of waiting. And you can become increasingly agitated by the amount of...
I almost threw up the first time I set foot inside the University of California, San Francisco's Comprehensive Care Center and joined the stream of thin, slow-moving, low-voiced, gray-skinned people. I didn't want to be one of the pitied, the struck-...
Usually, at the end of a film it's like I've finally gotten to know this person completely, and then we're done. That actually happened on the set of 'Twilight,' and then it happened again on 'New Moon.' Each time my character Bella became a differen...
My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the ...
I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the origi...
I've really loved steampunk for a long time, ever since 'Wild Wild West,' and it's always been a genre and an era that's fascinated me. But so often it's set in England, and that doesn't really resonate with me, or maybe it just seems a little overdo...
L.A. is wonderful. They have something called sleep dentistry. You just go there, and they put you to sleep and go, 'Drrrrrr,' and by the time you wake up a few hours later, you have a whole new set of teeth. I mean, whatever you want them to do.
Originally I wanted somewhere to set my short stories about the sort of people I recognise having grown up with. Carnbeg was staring me in the face all the time, only I had somehow failed to see that. Not seeing the wood for the trees, I suppose.
There came a time when these two incompatible notions of who I was, well, something had to give. Either that 'something' is where you acquiesce to the world around you and you conform, or you sort of defiantly break whatever remaining bonds connect y...
Rather than set aside daily time for prayer, I pray constantly and spontaneously about everything I encounter on a daily basis. When someone shares something with me, I'll often simply say, 'let's pray about this right now.'
I was so nervous because I was doing my first film. I didn't want to embarrass myself. I'm an incredibly insecure person, and knowing that I had to go on set in next to nothing, it scared me, but at the same time, I knew it would be a challenge to op...
John Milton: Free will. It's like butterfly wings: once touched, they never get off the ground. No, I only set the stage. You pull your own strings.
Nathan: One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.
