My first manager, Suzanne DeWalt, saw a play I was in. She was invited by the director Joan Scheckel, who was my first real acting teacher. Joan was also good friends with my friend Susie Landau Finch, who had first encouraged me to consider acting, ...
I am honored to have served as our great nation's first National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. I will continue to serve as Ambassador Emeritus. And I will make good on my Ambassadorial promise to my wife to stop playing the 'Fanfare' ever...
People lose it when I say this, but I'm a novelist who doesn't read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I'm also a game writer who doesn't play games - I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. ...
Of course I wanted an agent from the time I was like 5, but my mother was like, 'No, you're going to be normal, you're going to go to school, you're going to get good grades, you're going to play soccer, and if you do well, if you keep your grades up...
I like to have a sense of accomplishment through work. I'm busy golfing and attending activities, but I think of holding a meeting as playing golf. I think my approach is very good. I don't feel I lose a lot of fun things in life even though I am bus...
My body's feeling it a little bit. But one good thing, my back is in good shape, and that's my main concern. I know that my legs are going to take awhile to get back to where I was a few years ago, but as long as my back is solid, I feel that I can p...
I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great ch...
Everybody has their iPhone cameras, BlackBerry cameras, and I see those cameras pointed up at me all the time now, which is actually really good because of what it does for me and my band. There is no time for us not to be on our toes because they're...
I couldn't make it on the swimming team in high school. In fact, I got thrown off the swimming team and was forced to audition for the school play because they had at the audition about 35 girls show up and no boys, so my swimming coach suggested tha...
I started trying to do my own music at home, and I was like, 'You know what, I can play the guitar, sort of. And I can do these things, sort of. And I can make these crazy noises on my computer, sort of. But I need a ridiculously good drummer. I need...
You can go out and find ways to make your own record and get it out there now. If you really want to, you can be heard. Keep things simple. Learn to go out and play solo. That's a really really good thing to learn, if you're a singer-songwriter. Don'...
I get my drive and determination from just winning and playing tennis. I know if I don't work, I won't get rewarded. It was a life long dream to win a Grand Slam so when I was able to do that it felt so good and I wanted to do it again. It's not that...
When you come off that last hole and you've just finished a good round of golf, life is good. When you come off that last hole and you messed it up through four or five holes and just played a lousy round of golf, it's just not a very good day. It ju...
When I was about six, I saw my elder siblings play chess and pestered my mother into teaching me. Very soon, I was beating everyone at home, and they thought it would be good to join a club. So my sister would take me to the Tal chess club on Thursda...
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...
I want someone who will love me for the person I am and not because of my status. It has to be someone who understands the pressure of playing for India. It will be very difficult to be with a person who has her own career because someone has to make...
I'm not comfortable being around too many people. I don't like being out in public too much. I don't like going to bars. I don't like doing celebrity stuff. So most of the characters I play are people who don't always feel comfortable beyond their sm...
The more downtime we have, the more time you have to play games like 'Ghost Recon Future Soldiers,' so for me it's a fun way to get integrated into video games and for me to have fun with my buddies and team up and go into battle with 'em, kind of li...
Western Christians have imagined that, at the end of the day, God is going to throw the present space-time universe into a trashcan and we'll be sitting on clouds playing harps. The ultimate future that we're promised is much more interesting than th...
I actually went to see 'Rushmore,' and I came late, and I missed myself. It was great, that scene. I caught that scene the other day on TV, funny enough, the first scene that you see with Jason Schwartzman and myself, where we talk about his grades. ...
Because my musical background is so diverse, it lends me to have very much my own style and it helps me to relate to the music as I'm going to play it. I just write. And if it comes out country, it's a country song. The funny thing is, I write all ac...
