The first thing people say to me when they meet me is, 'You're so much skinner in person.' You have to live up to these standards that are so unrealistic. I try to tune it out.
My mission is to support our service members. They're volunteers, and if they're going to go to a hostile place like Afghanistan, I think we owe it to them to back them up and try to help them get through it.
In many ways, when you're young and sexy, it's very annoying to be whistled at and to have someone always trying to attract your attention, but now when it happens I find myself registering the fact almost warmly.
Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives.
The more people that learn about you, even if you're an underdog, then you can come under fire a lot and the more attention you get and the more threatening or dangerous you appear to people. And the more people try to knock you down.
Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.
Only free people have an incentive to be virtuous. Only people who bear the consequences of their own acts will care about those consequences and try to learn from their mistakes.
I try to read everything that's sent me - play scripts, movie scripts - but I've had to make a rule. If the author hasn't grabbed me by Page 25, the piece goes back with a note of apology.
When you can't have someone but you're not willing to accept that, you try harder and become more extreme about it. Either you win the person back or you drive him away.
We spend our lives trying to get along with people so we can keep our jobs, keep our marriages together, so that we can raise our kids properly.
Even when you're out with someone, you need to get out of your head. And you can try exercises by putting yourself in situations where you may not feel completely comfortable, like going to a gallery opening on your own.
When I write, I write for myself, and I have high expectations... so I'm just trying to meet those. I'm not going to distract myself with other people's expectations.
There is joy in self-forgetfulness. So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness.
Nobody can be whatever they want to be. No kid can do whatever they want to do. It's a total lie. But they have the right to try and do whatever they want to do. That's their right, to aim to do whatever they want to do.
I'm trying to avoid having regrets about missing opportunities. That would be the worst thing. Like having an audience waiting, and not working hard enough, and coming out with a record that disappointed them.
I most enjoy sitting down with the acoustic guitar and just fiddling around and trying to come up with something like a hook or some sort of melodic line. That's something that I do habitually.
The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about.
I think especially with the Internet and the amount of reality shows that are going on, there's no way to keep a secret anymore, so I try to let my project be as much as reality show as I can allow it to be.
Don't try to talk anyone out of concentrating his hatred on Ayn Rand or any other dead person. It can't harm the dead. Diverted to a living person, it might actually do harm.
My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material.
Frustration is a sign I am acting independently. The more you try your own way, the tighter the doors will stay closed.
