I just try not to subscribe to the ways of celebrity. I'm not a celebrity, I'm a working actor. A lot of the events - the parties and the premieres that people go to to get noticed - I'm just not into. I'll hang out with my friends, go see punk shows...
If you want to be an entrepreneur, it's not a job, it's a lifestyle. It defines you. Forget about vacations, about going home at 6 pm - last thing at night you'll send emails, first thing in the morning you'll read emails, and you'll wake up in the m...
When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South...
Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres, I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat, sleep, read, watch television and ignore your parents. It is n...
And after I compose my programs, but it is very easy because I look to the music in a very natural way without fuss, and so I look always music, in my home, like books and books and books, choose books and you read the pages, so I do this with music,...
I have come a long way and learnt a lot. I read this quote about a year ago: 'Happiness must not be pursued; it must ensue.' It's made me realise that just being married again or something like that won't make me happy; the happiness ensues from how ...
Reading 'Youth in Revolt' might have ruined my career because suddenly I wanted to abandon all the emotional truth of something and just go out far on a literary limb with completely implausible things that relied completely on voice and humor. And w...
I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. ...
Chopper Read attended a writing school I gave for inmates at Risdon Prison in Hobart many years ago. Even if I hadn't known about his hacked-off ears and his criminal history, I'd have found him powerful and compelling.
I can read a newspaper article, and it might trigger something else in my mind. I often like to choose in historical fiction things or subject matter I don't feel have been given a fair shake in history.
I got interested in the Vikings, and then you realize that there isn't much to be read about them because they did not write their history. It was written by hostile witnesses, by Christian monks and so on. From what I could see and understand, I was...
I did go through graduate school and I like to do research, to create something that has a certain objective solidity. The same thing influences my fiction to some degree, because, you know, my fiction is often based on history that I've read.
I started with the book 'Boardwalk Empire' and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before ...
I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies wher...
The first piece of 'long' fiction I wrote was a novella parody of Stephen King's 'Christine.' I was in high school, and my version was about a kid with a possessed locker instead of a possessed car. It was also my first attempt at humour, which fell ...
My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people and from reading the signs of the times....
Isn't that the great thing about Christmas? You get a lot of respite, time to recharge your batteries, time with family without too much else happening anywhere else in the world, time to focus on the people you love and the activities that you enjoy...
My dad couldn't connect to my wanting to be a filmmaker. He was very connected in entertainment, and through him I met Steven Spielberg and got rides on his private plane to California. I'd see Spielberg's people reading scripts. I was like, 'That's ...
Within our culture, every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or...
My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired.
I don't believe in the term 'guilty pleasure,' because it implies I should feel ashamed for liking something. A real guilty pleasure would be, I don't know, taking gratification in some stranger's ghastly death or something - which I guess I do enjoy...
