We've been trained since kindergarten: Be nice, be kind, share, put on a smile. So we're conditioned to squash our natural selfish instincts, and that's the right thing for society.
Golf can be tougher than tennis when things go wrong, because you can't explain things by saying that your opponent played better than you. It's a cruel sport in that way.
Nosology (from the Greek 'nosos,' meaning 'disease,' and 'logos,' referring to 'study') is not a sport for the timid, and certainly not for those so scrupulous about rules and order that they demand consistency in all things.
Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they're rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.
We have a society in which one of the greatest things you can do is a platform to see victim status, and one of the qualifications for that is that you have these exquisitely tender feelings about things and sensibilities which are easily offended.
I love emotional, intense stuff; it's easier to grab onto than just being simple. Being simple and relaxed can be the hardest thing. It can be easier to get your hooks into something big.
There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.
I'm doing things that are more artistic again, more close to the material that I love. I don't disparage those things that I did. They're just not as much reflective of who I am.
Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.
Ultimately, at the end of it, it's just trying to get into that space where you feel like you're hitting the right thing and you're making music. And it feels intuitive rather than being counterintuitive.
One of the reasons I wanted to do a show about Nashville in Nashville was because when I lived here, the hardest thing to go out and hear was country music. Country was taking place inside the studio and it was an export.
I was a kid at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, so a lot of things changed. You had pop music coming up, with David Bowie, you had new television programmes and all these things. I was fascinated.
I think one of the most important things punk brought back was the whole concept of staying independent and doing things yourself. It made music a lot less boring in any category you can name.
With film, it's all about the actor being able to feel the things that the character's feeling. It must do some strange things to your mind. Music I find much easier because you're being honest about where you are as a person.
There's a certain groove you pick that makes the music flow, and when you have it it's in your pocket. It's the feeling behind the rhythm... to me, the hardest thing to strive for is that feeling, behind the groove.
My mother told me when I was a toddler and in the crib that they would have music playing, and the thing when I lit up was boogie-woogie or something out of the Louie Jordan period of sometimes big bands, and then all kinds of things.
There is a kind of belief among my students that things that are true are interesting. But most things that are true are not interesting. Four pages describing how I got up and brushed my teeth in the morning would kill you.
He had written my mother once that he wanted her to be the first thing he saw every morning and the last thing he ever saw. And that's how it turned out.
One of the beautiful things about men is that they're very in the moment. That's why they don't want to have an argument about what happened six months ago.
If you look at attitudes today and where they are headed, it's clear to me that supporting equal rights, including the rights to civil marriage, is a net positive for winning elections, as well as the right thing to do.
Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened - but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies.
