If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.
The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don't know when. In the Hitchcock rules of suspense, you are supposed to know that there is a bomb on the bus that might blow up, and then it becomes very tense - but if you don't know that the...
Around 80% of Liberians are unemployed and only half of all children go to primary school. Just one in 20 go on to secondary school. Young children are on the streets instead of in the classrooms. We are not giving them the opportunity to learn and t...
Don't use all-or-nothing thinking. Take each day as its own day, and don't worry about it if you mess up one day. The most important thing you can do is just get back up on the horse.
At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go a...
Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother 'worked' at anything besides raising her children.
When nobody else celebrates you, learn to celebrate yourself. When nobody else compliments you, then compliment yourself. It’s not up to other people to keep you encouraged. It’s up to you. Encouragement should come from the inside.
When I was a kid growing up in Cleveland, I believed - completely, wholeheartedly, without reservation or pause - that the Cleveland Indians were named to honor a Native American ballplayer named Louis Sockalexis, who played for Cleveland in the late...
I started by looking everything up in a Star Trek dictionary so I knew what I was talking about, but you can't do that because they talk in circles, and half of it doesn't make sense, so you'll just end up driving yourself more insane.
I grew up down in Florida, and in the Keys, there's this place called Sea Camp which was not unlike Space Camp, except you explored the sea. And so that kind of whetted my appetite for that. But then I ended up swimming in a lagoon full of Cassiopeia...
I'm a Slovak. And when I was growing up, I believed that I was Czechoslovakian because of what Russia did. They came in and took two separate countries - Slovakia and the Czech Republic - put them together as one.
I acted at school but got very bad parts - things that they'd made up in Shakespeare plays like 'Guard 17' - so I wrote plays and gave myself parts, then I wrote sketches, then I did stand-up. Even in the school nativity I was the emu in the manger.
I am an Asian designer. I was born in Taiwan. That is who I am. But I am a designer, like any designer of any race. Growing up in the '80s in Taiwan, the arts were not considered a career.
The difference between a regular camera and a 3D camera, for an actor, is really no different except that the turn-arounds are longer. It takes a lot longer to set up a shot because the cinematographer is really trying to set up a whole world, so it ...
Because cheating is easier when we can justify our behavior, people often cheat in small amounts: We can come up with an excuse for stealing Post-It notes, but it is much more difficult to come up with an excuse for taking $10,000 from petty cash.
I don't come from a comedy background or a stand-up background, but I think that sometimes there's a misconception that an actor who works primarily in comedy is a comedian. There's nothing wrong with being a comedian, but I'm absolutely not that. I ...
I used to have this fantasy when I was growing up where Princess Leia would be in the slave Leia costume and she would be in a vat of Breyer's ice cream. A recurring dream where I would eat my way to her.
I met Kevin when I was 19, at a Second City workshop. We were paired up together in the first class I went to. By the end of the class we formed our improv group, and over the next three years we performed leading up to the formation of The Kids in t...
Turn up your radio. Watch lots of telly and eat loads of choc. Feel guilty. Stay up all night. Learn everything in six hours that has taken you two years to compile. That's how I did it.
I often heard about his cases and I often sat in on his trials. In the late 1960s when I was growing up I wanted to be a crusader like him but I didn't want to wear a suit and commute.
I feel like it's always important to curl your eyelashes. I always do when I wake up and you know you look tired, when you curl eyelashes and put mascara it makes such a huge difference, so that's the trick that I always use.
