Ever read a book that changed your life? Me neither.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

'How does your life turn out?' That's the ultimate novelistic question to me.

I'm not interested in someone's credits. Let me see who you are, and tell me a story of your life.

To me, nothing feels more like being dead than being in your 20s and having no direction in your life.

Everyone is your friend if you say yes, but say no and watch how they react. It's been a huge life lesson for me.

Life at a public company ain't for me. The board pays you what you're worth, then you get reamed for your compensation.

Luxury has been a bit of a rollercoaster for me. I would define it as something that isn't needed but improves your life.

For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.

Whichever profession you are in, the profession becomes a part of your personal life too. So, acting has become a part of me in all synergies.

Somebody said to me, 'You should keep a journal of this period in your life and really write down this stuff.' But that makes me a little uneasy.

It taught me that Clinton's instinct to make this about your life as a citizen, rather than his as a human being, was the right answer to these things.

It's taken me longer still to realize what a short span there is between those life experiences and the rest of your life. That's a job for the people who lived through it.

To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.

If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen.

That's part of the requirement for me to be an artist is that you're trying to share your personal existence with others and trying to illuminate modern life, trying to understand life.

It's not the part of being a celebrity that's so attractive to me. It's being recognized for your accomplishments and what you've done... becoming closer to what you want to achieve in life.

So many people have told me that 'Wicked' is their first musical ever and that they're hooked for life. I'm like, 'Wow, you really got it right when you picked this show to be your first one.'

My mother passed away when I was 19. She always made me feel confident, and I've carried that feeling with me my entire life. It's helped me in this industry, where people are sizing up your looks.

Very often, human beings are living like on autopilot, reacting automatically with what happens. What interests me about the life of an explorer is you are in the unknown; you are out of your habits.

Your name or what you've done on the rugby pitch is not going to carry you through for the rest of your life. I realise I'm going to have to eventually do something else, and that does frighten me a little bit.

I cannot understand for the life of me why DOE is going forward with this licensing procedure when we do not know whether or not the scientific documentation upon which you are basing your decisions is, in fact, flawed.

Donna Tartt blows me away - that impeccable writing, so rich you could eat it and so luminous that it lights up the whole room, and the way she brings her characters to life so completely and in such fine detail that you know them as intimately as your dearest friends.

I think everybody has tragedy in their life. Everybody has hurdles in their life. Everybody has tough things to overcome. My kids say to me, 'This isn't fair.' I said, 'Life isn't fair.' Everybody has their issues. It's how you handle your issues that distinguishes you.

But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.

When I started running, the pain barrier was very familiar to me, and I had no problem pushing beyond the pain. When for your whole life, every single workout, you are programmed to push beyond belief, it's really hard to just turn that off and kind of just be a social competitor.

Your whole life is changed with that first child. Your social behaviors are all turned upside down, you're sleep deprived, but eight months in, my son had this seizure, and it just woke me up to the idea that, oh, no, this can end. And it can end in a way that will destroy you forever.

Randomly enough, all of my favorite rappers growing up were East Coast rappers. I don't know. I just related to them a little more at first - because if you're born in L.A., and you lived there your whole life, Snoop Dogg literally sounds like cars driving by. You feel me? You hear Snoop Dogg so much.

Just the life of doing what I do, being in the public eye, it's a stressful environment... You feel strange, self-aware, very foolish. Your third eye clicks on, just to try to maintain a healthy sense of perspective, and you think, 'What am I doing here? I'm just making a movie, and people want all these things from me.'

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