I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing.
I couldn't not be who I am. That bubble eventually bursts down the road. So you just have to be real, and when you goof up, say you goofed up.
I only deal in what is real. To be honest, I've never thought about what I could get out of football or where it would take me. I just wanted to play. I'm the same now.
I intentionally shoot violence to make the audience feel real pain. I have never and I will never shoot violence as if it's some kind of action video game.
The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines.
The people who were in college in the '50s were my first real audience, and their kids, the people who found my records in the cabinet during their 'Mad 'magazine years picked me up also.
I try to keep my ear to the streets without sacrificing who I am as an artist. If a song needs a drum machine I'll use a drum machine. If it needs a drummer, I'll use a real drummer.
There's no secret about my ambition, I do not want to go into the House of Commons. My only real political interest is in London and if one day I'm in a position to run for mayor, then terrific.
Today, if you do put out a record on a label, traditionally, most people are going to hear it via a leak that happens two weeks - if not two months - before it comes out. There's no real way around that.
I grew up - for a while, the only show I could watch if I hadn't finished my homework was 'The Simpsons,' because I think my parents saw that there was some real-life lessons to take from that.
Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.
You can demonize Goldman Sachs all you want, and I'm sure there are reasons to do it. But the real pressure is all of us pressuring the companies for stock returns, and that leads to all kinds of decisions.
You can let go of all that stuff you thought was real when you know it's just a game. What a relief, what a state of grace that brings.
I have written in my life many critical poems, but viewed in retrospect, they were merely a human harmless reflection, and not a true likeness of the real society of today.
When your whole system, your whole civilized system goes down, this is pretty much what you get left with. We have no communications, no running water, no electricity, no real help.
When I started to write realistic, real fiction, the voices that were the strongest for me - the characters that I heard, the people that I knew - were the ones from my childhood.
The real Stephen Colbert is a practicing Catholic. He teaches Sunday school. He can recite chapter and verse of chapter and verse - from both the King James Bible and 'The Lord of the Rings.'
I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have.
Unfortunately because of the variety of outlets for people to speak their minds on the Internet and that kind of thing, it's made the media in general more opinionated and there's more of a 'gotcha mentality' than real reporting.
I just try to keep the same people I've had around me from Day One. Keep it a real small circle because if you do that, not too much is going to go bad for you.
I'd rather have a real South Dakotan who has lived in this state and made her living here instead of someone with a fancy East Coast law degree any day.
