Los Angeles is such a town of show business, and I'm a terrible celebrity. I find it difficult - it's the beast that must be fed. There's this big wheel of pictures and articles that goes around, and you get pinned on it.
My father was a journalist for 50 years in Leeds and Fleet Street. I thought about a career in business to show I could do something different, but the reaction among prospective employers was, shall we say, underwhelming.
I have a girlfriend, but I don't really want to talk about her. I won't name her. She isn't in show business, has nothing to do with it. So I'd rather just keep her out of it.
There's no one I trust in show business more than Sabrina Wind. She's my eyes and ears when I can't be there. She weighs in on everything, from scripts to sets to advertising.
Show business is one of the few businesses that the devil will actually agree to own just a portion of your soul because he knows if you have a performer's ego you were probably working for him all along.
I'll tell you where the injustice is. It's with the person earning £12,000 to £15,000-a-year who is being asked to be restrained by their business or employer. Yet the taxpayer has bailed out the banks, so why are they not showing restraint?
I think the show has sort of given me a name in this business and allowed a lot of people the opportunity to see what I can do, and it's just sort of like a sweet starting point.
Eventually I booked a 2-line role on a show called 'JAG' and slowly the parts got bigger and better. I'm very thankful that I had to appreciate how difficult the business is before I had any kind of success.
Show business is part of a larger culture, a world-wide culture that must make up to the fact that the accumulation of things doesn't make a life necessary any happier or purposeful.
You still have that competitive thing where you want to try to make hits. That won't go away, unless the mayor of show business says my time's up.
I think I'm lucky having parents that have been in show business for a while, and they don't care about the shiny stuff so much. They raised me in that way - to stay grounded, not to chase the shiny, pretty things.
The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I'm willing to show you. In you, it's courage and daring. In me, it's weakness.
If you set as your goal to roll back the size of government, you have an obligation to answer the tough questions and show real courage, not just appeal to ideology. Treat the voters like adults.
If you see a person who's insecure and covers it up, it can be quite a problem. But the person who is insecure and shows you is quite appealing. They give you just the courage to drop your defenses.
In 1984, showing extraordinary courage, a group of Guatemalan wives, mothers and other relatives of disappeared people banded together to form the Mutual Support Group for the Appearance Alive of Our Relatives.
I hope America can also be the cultural leader of the world, and use this frontier spirit to lead and show others that we need courage to go places where we have not gone before.
I was a guy who showed up for work and took the chance for finding out whether I could do it or not... I'd like to think I made my success not at the expense of anyone. Success was accidental.
When Hank Jones had his night off, I would get somebody to take my place as intermission pianist and I'd play the show with Ella, so I would get a chance to play with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith as well.
People buy a ticket to see your show, so from the moment I get onstage, I can have no insecurities, because they're already there. You have to get people to listen. If they listen, everything's cool.
For a long time the people at my shows were sort of the Pantera-tattoo trucker guys, really cool dudes, but I don't know what happened to them. That's the crowd that I like, the ones that don't get so offended just to be offended.
YI think what's cool about 'Scott Pilgrim' is that it shows that there is a superhero within all of us. There's not one ideal image of what a superhero looks like, and you don't really see that until the end of the film.
