Always set small, realistic goals that you know you can achieve first. But don't give up on the bigger ones that may seem too far from your reach.
I think what you learn, working on a film or TV set, is how to tune certain things out. You've got 60-100 people swirling around you, each of them with a very important job to do.
Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors - it's how you combine them that sets you apart.
There are allowable limits for radiation going - I mean there's radiation all around us. There's radiation from your television set. There's radiation from your computer. There's radiation actually occurring in the ground.
I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting.
I didn't set out to be a villain in film. I'm a character actor, and if my first movie was a comedy, I could have played a geek just as well.
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility.
Unless you have a sense of values that's shared by people and turns them loose to do certain things on their own within those sets of values, the organization, whether a nation or corporation or citizen group, just doesn't work very well.
I once pitched this show that was just like 'Quantum Leap,' in terms of the set-up, and I got a pass because they said 'Quantum Leap' didn't work, even though it was on for six or seven seasons. You can't say 'Quantum Leap' didn't work!
My mentor Jon Simmons introduced me to the Stanislavski system, which is so heavy on back-story. So you write and write and write these back stories about a character and then you throw it away. So then on set, if it doesn't come, then you didn't do ...
A lot of white-collar work requires less of the routine, rule-based, what we might call algorithmic set of capabilities, and more of the harder-to-outsource, harder-to-automate, non-routine, creative, juristic - as the scholars call it - abilities.
I was seeing everything through pain. I would roll out of bed and do my exercises. I had to do that to work out the remainder of the pain pills. I would drink coffee and go to the set and plunge myself so far into my work.
I'm working in this very complex set of issues having to do with who we are as a species and how much we can do to the Earth before it starts to buckle under. My work can easily read as an indictment, but I don't see it as that simple a problem.
I wouldn't ask any of my employees to do anything I wouldn't do. And I work as hard, if not harder than the rest of the staff, to set an example. I also believe in giving my employees a lot of room to be creative and to express themselves.
The University of Southern California has a wonderful social work department, and I was thrilled to find out that they have a whole veterans' initiative program there. They approached me, and I set up a scholarship that would go to a military-oriente...
I'm very, very lucky to be a working actor, but I've also been careful. I don't just take anything. 'Durham County' came to me. You have to look at the quality of work you do, and 'Durham' set the standard. I wait for things that keep me really inter...
When you're on tour, you're trying to get the crowd involved and really sing and perform to them. When you're going to write and be in the studio, it's like, 'Now I have to think about me.' That's the mind-set you have to work with.
Sometimes when you get on a new movie you kind of how to figure out the way other people work and it can be like being the new kid in high school where you're just trying to find out where your place is on the movie or on the set.
I'm the old-fashioned type who prefers to meet a woman in a more normal setting. I don't like to feel that I'm being hunted down. I've always liked to do my own hunting when it comes to meeting women.
The paranormal bad boy is usually a fiercely loyal partner for the heroine. Once his sights are set on her, he doesn't notice other women, and he's utterly unconcerned with what anyone else thinks of his choice.
I didn't want to set up a women's studies program. I thought women should learn to operate in a coeducational atmosphere, because, especially in national security and international affairs, it's male-dominated.
