Dad was the first man I fell in love with. He was a very funny man. He grew up in the East End of London and was very dynamic, and I understood why my mother fell in love with him.
It's funny: All my friends back home are always wondering why every television show I'm on is a drama, but all the comedy pilots I did died a slow and painful death.
Even when you're making a movie about life, death is a presence, and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly. Maybe I'm drawn to it as a story element.
Death just comes, not happiness. Because when you're trying to find happiness, you're trying to navigate a very, very murky minefield of distractions, of disappointments, of deceptions. That's why you have to work on happiness.
Why is it that men who can go through severe accidents, air raids, and any other major crisis always seems to think that they are at death's door when they have a simple head cold?
I'm not frightened about death. I don't know why, but I just feel that at a certain moment your switch is switched off, and that's it. And you can't do anything about it.
For me, life and death are very important themes. There is no life without death. That's why it's very important to me.
At the core, I try to write characters who are real people with real insecurities, fears, hopes, and dreams, which is why hopefully readers can identify with them.
There's a logic to dreams that doesn't necessarily follow linear narrative. You don't know why things happen, it's your subconscious pushing you, to give you information.
Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.
I've learnt something from every failure. The products I helped design at the first two companies I worked for were utter failures. But now I know why.
I didn't have the welfare. I didn't have the proper education. I didn't have these things. That's why it's almost like a complex in me that I want to explode myself in my films.
Through books and photographs, I saw a world that was not my own - and I realized that there was another world. That's why I'm concerned about education, because it helps our children see other worlds.
Freedom begins with what we teach our children. That is why Jews became a people whose passion is education, whose heroes are teachers and whose citadels are schools.
I require every Taipei student to swim; if they can't pass the test they won't graduate. Why do I do that? Because I think that is very, very important integral part of their education.
This is not a skill problem, this is a will problem. Does America have the will to make education a priority? We know the things that work. Why don't we scale up those things that do work.
American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America.
I don't disagree with anything I've ever said. Why in God's name would I disagree with something I've said?
If a man is pictured chopping off a woman's breast, it only gets a R rating, but if, God forbid, a man is pictured kissing a woman's breast, it gets an X rating. Why is violence more acceptable than tenderness?
Whenever there is a catastrophe, some religious people inevitably ask, 'Why didn't God do something? Where was God when all those people died?'
I'm driven by history and our past. That's why I work in gold. It's in your veins. We've been lusting after gold since the beginning of time. God, glory, and gold.
