In my house, there is an old Chinese cabinet full of little figurines on two shelves. They are for my daughter, to tell stories. We have told hours and hours or stories using these figures. There are all kinds of people, children and adults, and all kinds of animals – elephants, tigers, snakes.
I don’t respond to authority figures who abuse their authority.
I know we’re public figures, but I strongly believe my private life should remain private. What ultimately matters and concerns the world is the work we leave behind.
My father left when I was three, and I have no memory of him. The most significant male figures in my life were my grandfather, in whose house I lived during the first 10 years of my childhood, and later my stepfather.
I still remember my first Giacometti exhibition, and going back to the museum every day, whenever I could, to look again and again at these long, thin stick figures, so beautiful, so graceful. That, I think, was the moment I became really obsessed by art.
When I look back on my life, it seems nearly everything of interest happened in little more than one decade – dramas, tragedies, major events, pleasures, my close friendships with artists and political figures, the lovely places where I lived in England and New York, the trips to Europe, visits at the White House.
Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.
I think, with my cartoons, the parent-like figures are kind of my own archeypes of parents, and they’re taken a little bit from my parents and other people’s parents, and parents I have read about, and parents I dreamed about, and parents that I made up.
I don’t think I consciously say, ‘What would Olivia Pope do?’ but there’s a new thread of belief in my own capacity that I think comes from her. She makes it happen. She figures it out. She fixes it.
Things happen, you have bad shooting days, the defense kind of figures you out.
I have a trophy case that contains all the action figures ever made of me. It also has items I’ve stolen from my movies, like three guns and holsters from ‘Serenity’.
I feel like we are reintroducing historical figures, with the explorer Marco Polo and the grandson of Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, the ruler of the Mongol empire, the trading place that everybody wanted to get involved in.
Virtue looks good but it only suits imposing figures.
A lot of people are very happy to read their newspaper either on their iPad or – startlingly and faster and faster the figures go up – on their telephone, on their smart phone.
