My whole life I've hated to lose, no doubt about it. I've been guilty of that since I was 6 years old, at camp. I have always played to win. That's who I am. But I never hurt anybody. The problem is when you're perceived as being too aggressive where...
My life used to be like that game of freeze tag we played as kids. Once tagged, you had to freeze in the position you were in. Whenever something happened, I'd freeze like a statue, too afraid of moving the wrong way, of making the wrong decision. Th...
I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life - I'm in awe of how much D.H. Lawrence managed to get around. But t...
People come to L.A. because they're chasing that dream of a better life. That's why I came here, because I thought it would be a place where I would find other people like me; people who wanted to write, people who had a dream of being something else...
The first year I was in New York, I met Martha Graham. She said, 'Well, Mr. Wilson, what do you want to do in life?' I was 21 years old, and I said, 'I have no idea.' And she said, 'If you work long enough and hard enough, you'll find something.'
The fact that you can remember yesterday but not tomorrow is because of entropy. The fact that you're always born young and then you grow older, and not the other way around like Benjamin Button - it's all because of entropy. So I think that entropy ...
I want my kids to have passion for life, to really have a passion for life. I think when you have a passion for something, you can overcome obstacles, if you float through life without having anything to hold on to or get you fired up emotionally and...
When you're at a public pool or in your friend's backyard, knowing that your kids can get in and out of the water and protect themselves can make all the difference in the world. Something as simple as being able to flip over and get to the ladder ca...
I don't think the job of the antiracist is to convert the far-out heathen racist, or give them their 'come to Jesus' moment, as it's called. They'll either have those or they won't, and usually, when they have them, it's not because of something some...
Although in skating you compete with other people, anyone who achieves a certain level of success is first and foremost competing against themselves. And for me the idea that I could always do better, learn more, learn faster, is something that came ...
Now, learning how to make a movie is something you can figure out in about an afternoon. The physics of it, the marks, the lights, etc. What's hard to do is to suspend your own feelings of self consciousness. The natural actors can do that; they can ...
If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you're doing something else or not. You can be connected with community theater or make your own little movies. But if you want to be a movie star, you've got a tough road ahead of...
I love sitting through long things. I mean, 'Gone With the Wind' I will sit through; I love sitting somewhere for four hours, for anything. I love being on a train. I love sitting down for four hours. I think it's the most wonderful thing to be able ...
I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp - what I hear in my head I don't always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I'm not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same thr...
I'm quite sure Shakespeare enjoyed writing Iago much more than he did writing Othello. If you write about someone you love, what the hell are you supposed to say about that person? It's much better to have something between you and your main characte...
I would love to see no more ghettos, but the things is, there's no diplomacy in the ghetto. They want to tell you something, they tell you straight! An upper class, more educated person - they find a diplomatic way to tell you the thing. I love it wh...
Meat, to me, it's slightly boring. Hold on, I love meat too, but only once in a while. You get a piece of meat, and you put it in your mouth, you chew, the first five seconds, all the juices flow around your mouth, they're gone, and then you are 20 m...
Recording a song for a film doesn't take much time; it's hardly an hour's job, but concerts are constant ,and so is travelling, so I've to take time out to work on my albums because I'm passionate about creating my own music. When you love something ...
Sometimes I feel like doing smaller budget stuff. When I did 'Young Adam', for instance, I'd come out of 'Black Hawk Down' and 'The Island', and I really wanted to be on a small film set. I wanted to be on something intimate and small again, and then...
We have to learn to appreciate the things that help put foods on our tables. They don't have to be our dream jobs, but we must at least be grateful that we have something to rely on. We live in an imperfect world; so we have to learn how to make the ...
You never make all things for all people and can't always pander to the broadest denominator. I keep an eye toward doing the themes that interest me. Do they move me? Interest me? Make me think? When I run across something that is provocative in an u...
