My first job was in sixth grade, sweeping the clay tennis courts at the yacht club near my house, which I was not a member of. Always had to pay my own rent. But I don't really have any concept of how money works. I don't know how much things cost. L...
I think any writer is a fool if he doesn't do it for money. There needs to be some kind of incentive in addition to the project. It all goes together. It's fun to sit there and think of characters and get them into action, then be paid for it. I can'...
I imagine like most of us that I'd like obscene amounts of money but the people I met and worked with who have those obscene amounts of money and have obscene amounts of fame have awful lives. Really. I mean hideously compromised lives. And I can go ...
I used to do volunteer work in poor areas of Cairo, and people would gather their money together to get a satellite dish. You'd see them huddling around and for the first time seeing issues being debated on TV that had never been talked about before....
One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works...
For the past few years, I've been more selective than I have any right to be, but I think that's finally starting to work in my favor. I think I get way too much credit for making what people consider to be smart choices, but it's only because I made...
When I was older and I first started working, I was obsessed with buying my first Chanel jacket. I saved up my hard-earned money, went to Barneys, and bought a little black Chanel jacket. It saw many, many job interviews and many, many events. I'm no...
In theory, people would pick progression every time over being idle. But if you look at us as a culture, as a people, you would say that if you get up at five o'clock in the morning, eat your breakfast, go to work, make money, pay your bills, you're ...
When I decided to be a musician I reckoned that that was going to be the way of less profit, less money. I was sort of giving up the idea of making a lot of money. It was what I loved to do. I would have done it anyway. If I'd had to work at Taco Bel...
I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.
Whether you're talking about Shakespeare or, you know, if you look at Greek tragedies. I mean, every playwright, every songwriter, every artist who's ever sat down and been moved to create something, has been living in a context. A political moment t...
It's so much work to make a movie, and for me it has to get me off my butt. To get me actually writing you have to strike something inside, you have to hit a power main to get the energy. You have to strike something you care about.
By 'flat' I did not mean that the world is getting equal. I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before. That's why an Indian in Bangalore can take care of the office...
Most of the time, as an artist, I can be self-indulgent, fulfilling my own impulses, embracing imagery that contains poetry on my own terms, without immediate regard to an audience or the particular placement of my finished work.
This career essentially chased me down while I was on the spoken-word scene in New York. I kept hearing that my delivery of my poetry - which was very personal and cathartic at the time- was very moving to folks. People thought that I was an actress ...
This 'Making Mirrors' album is far more personal, even if there's a character element to the sounds I'm working with. Every song on this album I stand behind; I feel like I have a close relationship with them. There are older songs where I can feel m...
I had these kind of unrealistic expectations that were fueled by romantic comedies, and it has both helped me and hurt me in many ways. It helped me because, in general, they've made me hopeful. I just figure things will eventually work out for me. B...
My respect for artists is very high. I think to get the most out of them, you have to liberate them. I think part of liberating them is saying, 'Come up with something brilliant, new, and fresh. Stop thinking based on what has been beat into you by e...
The way I write is, I listen to things in my head, and then I copy them down. I memorize conversations and things like that; I seem to be able to do that pretty well. I suppose in that respect there's some improvisation, although I work over the stuf...
I went into science, ending up with a Ph.D. in cell biology, but along the way I found out that experimental science involves many hours and days and nights of laboratory work, which is a lot like washing dishes, only a little more challenging. I was...
Science works because the phenomenon being described can be relied on to remain the same. Even in quantum physics, where phenomena are changed by observation, the way in which observation interferes is regular and falls within a limited range of poss...
