Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I made a conscious decision to take my life and career in a different direction. I started working on a play, and also, by attending Burning Man for several years, I was incredibly stimulated by the art there. I increasingly wanted to be a part of it, and focused on what I wanted to say as an artist.
The great Jack Nicklaus summed things up neatly during a charity match on the Old Course at St. Andrews where he and I were playing against Ben Crenshaw and Glen Campbell. I asked him what he considered to be the most important factor to overcome in the game of golf. His reply, "It's an unfair game."
I want to do something where the script is there. That doesn't mean that I won't need to come in, or be asked to come in, and help develop something. Things can always get better. There's always room for improvement. But, I want to do something that's the best version of whatever it's supposed to be.
What if I told you insane was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years at the end of which they tell you to p*ss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn't you consider that to be insane?
I never really trained to be a musician, but I've been playing guitar since I was around, like, 13 years old. For me, the guitar has always been the instrument that I've played. I play a little piano. I taught myself everything by ear. I don't read music at all, which has not really been a hindrance.
Interviewing somebody is a lot different than being handed a stick in a 20,000-seat arena and trying to sell tickets. You're very green when you start. I'm still learning things to this day. I'm decent at interviews now, but man, getting people to buy tickets is the easiest thing in the world for me.
One of the hardest things for me to do is watch myself. The first time I see it, I am obsessed with my left ear or my right ear or some other physical attribute, or the fact that I'm 60 or whatever shallow ego thought is running through my head. I'm just destroyed that I'm not Cary Grant or whatever.
When I hit 16, I got a scooter to ride to school. It was bright pink, and I saw on the ownership papers that Jonathan Ross once owned it. My friends slated me for it because of the colour, but it was cool. My father used to ride, and my mother's boyfriend has a bike, so we're a bit of a biker family.
The last time I was in a Marshals' office, they had a poster of 'Justified' up. I asked them, 'Did you know I was coming by, so you put up a poster of the show?' And they said, 'Oh, we all love it... you guys make us look good.' I thought, this is great. If they like it, we really did something here.
I had been quite judicious about the scripts I was reading, but nothing was really taking my fancy until I pulled this script out: 'Lucifer.' I have to say, within about three or four pages, I thought it was hilarious; I laughed out loud a couple of times and knew this is the one that I wanted to do.
I really tried out for the part of Harry Potter, but they ended up picking me for the part of the enemy of Harry. Actually it is really fun playing the bad kid because it just has so many interesting qualities to it. And Daniel Radcliffe and I get along really well off set so it's really fun filming.
I have the version of me where I'm interviewing someone, where I definitely am the straight man, and I like to show a lot of respect to my guest and let them take the reins. I don't like to compete with my guests. I don't like to be funnier than my guests or get into a 'Who's wackier?' sort of thing.
When my stepmother had my sister, Katharine Hepburn dropped by to say hello. She came with George Cukor, who wasn't a star, but he was a famous director. He was also my grandmother's best friend, so I knew him well as a kid. But when George showed up with Katharine Hepburn, I was utterly star struck.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from a horse master. He told me to go slow to go fast. I think that applies to everything in life. We live as though there aren't enough hours in the day but if we do each thing calmly and carefully we will get it done quicker and with much less stress.
Sometimes you read a passage by a great writer, and you know what he says and how he says it will always be, for you, the only possible way it could be. Less often a painter will describe an event in a way that fits into your interpretation of that event so perfectly that it becomes the event itself.
I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it's the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that's why I'm attracted to it.
My teacher told my mum, 'I think William has dyspraxia,' and Mum asked what that meant. She said, 'Well, if I put a chair in the middle of the room and asked every child in the class to walk around it, William would be the only child in the class to walk into it.' Mum was like, 'Yeah, that's my boy'.
I think it reaffirmed something that I believed in and conceptually always had faith in which was that you're most effective when you work as a team. I love that about filmmaking. I stopped playing team sports at 15-16 because of acting. I think I find a kind of new team sport in filmmaking in a way.
A lot of directors say, 'Do whatever you want, and I'll just change it on set.' But I love being involved in every part of production. It's very exciting. It's like an empire of creation: Everybody is working so hard to respect a vision and an idea, and it's very weird and inspiring at the same time.
Awards are not something that I measure my work by. I've been so fortunate and I've gotten to do such terrific things that it seems petty to look back and say, 'Oh, I should have gotten that prize.' I've been so blessed, it's hard to look back and think anything but that, so I have no disappointments.
I actually run a non-profit where one of the main objectives is to branch out and get a new audience for the theater. Just because the writing is so good and nothing is more effective than seeing something live and happening right in front of your face, so I definitely want to continue to pursue that.
I watched a lot of the James Bond movies, certainly, both the old ones and the reboot with Daniel Craig. I watched a lot of the Matt Helm films with Dean Martin, which just have these great car scenes where it's rear-projected, and they just start making martinis out of a bar in the glove compartment.
Even in my comedies, I don't take anger as a joke. I think anger and laughter are very close to each other, when you think about it. One of the things I like about a character: I always think it's fascinating when a character can turn on a dime and go from one emotion to another. I like watching that.
As an actor, I'm allowed - encouraged! - to explore emotions that have been basically unacceptable in my life. I have a huge well of emotional stuff, and once I give myself permission as an actor, it all comes to the surface. But I'll be damned if I can give myself permission to bring it out as a man.
I love acting. I just love it. It's in my bones. I remember when I was a kid, I watched an interview with Dennis Hopper talking about Jimmy Dean on the set of Rebel Without A Cause. Jimmy said to him, "If you've got to cry in a scene, you've got to cry. Make it real." And that's all that I believe in.
I don't do anything that would ever come across as advice or suggestion, but it's just part of a debate. Like, "I would like to try this," or "Let me do another one with more stillness, let me emphasize that." Rather than "I think you should emphasize this, I think" - you know, I don't impose choices.
I've always said that Miguel Pinero's story is a quintessential American tale. An immigrant who comes to this country, is immediately marginalized to the lowest economic level and persecuted because of his skin color and, in spite of all the obstacles put in his way, he becomes a huge popular success.
Of those, the only one that really stands out for me is Tales From The Darkside, for a couple of reasons, one in particular being who I got to work with on it, which was Eddie Bracken. I mean, what a man. Someone who's done Preston Sturges movies, and I actually got to work with him? And he was great.
All cultures are different. Some commit genocide. Some are uniquely peaceful. Some frequent bathhouses in groups. Some don't show each other the soles of their shoes or like pictures taken of them. Some have enormous hunting festivals or annual stretches when nobody speaks. Some don't use electricity.
I want to date Cheryl Cole. She is a looker, she's the one. I love her accent, its so sexy. She's free and I'm still a bachelor. That girl is so beautiful, Ill treat her well. I'm thinking weddings one day, why not? Just think of the kids. I'm getting ahead of myself here, I haven't even met the girl.
In late 2004, I left my much-maligned home state of New Jersey for the supposedly greener pastures of Astoria, Queens. I'd finally be in the mix, living off the subway line, able to go from audition to audition during the day and from late night show to late night show in the wee hours of the morning.
As John Kerry sails toward the Democratic nomination, new questions are emerging about President Bush's service in the National Guard, like where he was for six months in 1972 and why he refused to take a routine physical. President Bush has vowed to get to the bottom of this right after Election Day.
I found the hedge-fund guys I met all to be very, very concentrated listeners - watchful and articulate and quick to defend, if needed. They all seemed to have this contained sitting posture. The legs, if they weren't crossed at right angles, tended to be close over the knee, their hands put together.
Theatre, when it is at its best, takes a lot of beating - the live experience and the shared collective experience of live storytelling is really special when it is good. Particularly here in New York because the audiences are amazing, very vocal and very engaged, and that makes theatre very exciting.
There's a lot of black men running around with crazy trauma scars, and they should be going to therapy. They should be sitting down and talking to people. But they can't. If you've got the armor of being a man, and the armor of being a black man, that hyper-masculine thing can make those scars deeper.
What's more important is that we talk about movements; change happens through movements. The movement to end slavery, the movement to bring justice for those who have been left out of the system, movements to include women, movements around sexual preference - all these movements brought about change.
When I was 11, I moved to Los Angeles to live with my father and stepmother and my half brothers. I became really close to my stepmother, and I am still very close to my brothers. My stepmother is the actress Shirley Jones, who was in The Partridge Family alongside me, so we worked together for years.
One of the skills you have to master in theater is the ability to make the audience believe that things that aren't there are there - just like when you're acting against CGI. Also, in a theater, the people in the back row can't see the whites of your eyes. Or your lips moving as you deliver dialogue.
I'm not an evangelist Christian at all. I can't try to convert anybody. It's not in me to do that. But my faith has given me such an appreciation of people and meaningful relationships, and a world view which I didn't have before. And although I will fail every day, it gives me something to aspire to.
If you think about portraying Americans, for example, in a Russian film, it all depends on where the American is from, if they went to school or not, and if they're well-educated or not. Is it an American from Texas, or an American from Brooklyn? Things would change with the vocabulary and the accent.
A few years ago you couldn't go from TV to film. It was like a 'no no' but I believe when you find a plan and purpose that God has for your life, there's not anything man can do to you. Especially when your faith is not really standing in the wisdom of man, you're really standing in the wisdom of God.
A lot of the guilt didn't help my drinking at that point. I never expected a divorce to happen in my life particularly, but it just slowly happened. My wife was proud of me, but she hated the business, and for good reason. The spouses get moved, shoved aside, and ignored, and it's just, it's terrible.
There was a time in my life when opportunities were so few and far between they were like little cracks in the wall, and if one opportunity came my way, I would scratch and claw and bite and I would do anything I could to make sure that I grabbed that opportunity by the throat and I did not let it go.
The scene [in The Hangover] where the tiger actually pops up behind us, that's actually a Jim Henson tiger puppet. The Jim Henson Company actually supplied that tiger. And it's really cool. Its entire face moves. It has like all these little motors in its eyebrows and cheeks and mouth. It was amazing.
The reality is that not only were we massively hit in 2008 when the bubble burst, and then we realized how deep the social gap, the economic gap in the world is between the super rich and the poor; also, we realized how impacted the environment has been. So there's been a physical consequence of that.
As an actor, I've always wanted to do characters that would help me find my connection with others and connect all of us together. You always want the energy of the character, the spirit of the person, to enter you. I've been doing this for 26 years and some of the things I've done are always with me.
While the film [Hide and seek] is a work of fiction, I know many people, not just women, who have felt the way my character feels in the film, a certain kind of invisibility. I am grateful that my parents, Bev Umehara and Russell Chang, instilled a healthy sense of self-esteem in me from an early age.
Even before I could vote, I was involved in the political arena. My father was an admirer of Adlai Stevenson, and he took me to the Stevenson for President headquarters, and he volunteered me. That was my introduction to electoral politics, which was exciting and fun and thrilling and very theatrical.
I always admire the French and the Italians who are very devoted to their marriages. They take them extremely seriously, but it is understood that there might be other visitors at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. You just never boast about. They never say anything, but that's what keeps marriages together.
What is it that we need to do to explain to the public exactly is what is happening? We are destroying our precious water resources at this alarming rate, and again, why? When we have so many viable alternatives? "Oh,alternative power is too expensive, what about the jobs" - this is dinosaur thinking.