Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Part of me, even when I was trying to get acting jobs, I was still kind of thinking, 'Oh I should do something else with my life.'

I grew up thinking 'The Hills' was real life and it made me feel terrible about my own. Like, why wasn't I perfect and pretty like them?

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

I've never really lived a conventional life, so I think it's quite foolish for me or anyone else to start thinking that I am going to start making conventional choices.

For someone like me who gets bored very easily, this life is perfect. I can't be at one place for too long. Travelling broadens your thinking as a person and as an actor.

There's no point thinking, 'Well, my life's certainly worked out, I've got all the answers.' It would be wrong for me to say that I don't get seduced by certain things. That things don't become tempting.

I'm just opening the doors. And a lot of this is new to me - thinking about it, and letting go again and again and again, trusting that if I'm meant to continue working as a musician, it'll happen. If I'm not, then pull out the life support.

If any successes has come to me, it came because I insisted on thinking things through. That's all I was capable of doing in life, was thinking pretty hard about trying to get the right answer, and then acting on it. I never learned to do anything else.

I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.

I was depressed after the transplant because it's very tough to understand the trauma you still face. I remember emptying a big bag of medication and just crying and thinking, 'For me to survive another day, this is what I've got to take. For the rest of my life. I'm not sure I can continue.'

There have been many people whom I have admired, emulated and even modeled parts of my life after. I study how they do things, and then I go through a period of 'trying on' those same thinking patterns and behaviors. After awhile, what is not essentially me falls away while the useful parts remain.

I mentioned that I received a scholarship to Episcopalian school, and the model for the school was 'From each according to his or her ability and to each according to his or her need.' And it's something that is still really important to me in thinking about how I prioritize what I do with my life.

If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit.

I gathered that those two Big-shot Boys, Joe + Fletcher, just was afraid to let me sing, thinking maybe I'd sort of ruin their reputations with their musical public. They not knowing that I had been singing all of my life. In churches, etc. I had one of the finest All Boys Quartets that ever walked the streets of New Orleans.

I was working at the 'New York Times,' ruing every second of my life, thinking how was I ever going to get out of here, and thinking that one could only do it the way newspaper people have always done it. I needed a scoop, and I would go out and I would dream upon coming upon fires or the sky falling in front of me or anything.

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