Growing up, I always saw the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. The history speaks for itself, and I grew incredibly frustrated and angry. I essentially just put that into my words.
A high openness score means you’re open-minded – you see the world for what it is – whereas a low openness score means you’re incredibly closed-minded, and you see the world the way you want to see it, regardless of what is actually going on.
Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I’m writing the manuscript, the characters I’m writing dictate how the plot unfolds.
You don’t write a book. You write a sentence and then a paragraph and then a page and then a chapter. Looking at writing 400 plus pages or seventy thousand odd words is incredibly daunting, but if you just focus on the immediate picture – say, 500 words – it’s not so overwhelming.
The whole issue of how women’s management styles are viewed is an incredibly interesting subject.
I read ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race’ and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer’s ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.
What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, but it is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but the next day there is an idea. I find that incredibly exciting and conceptually actually remarkable.
I am lucky that my in-laws are incredibly special people and I love them dearly. My father-in-law is an extraordinary man and my mom-in-law a beautiful and brave woman.
I’ve studied astrology for many, many years, and I feel like it’s an incredibly challenging art.
Directing films is incredibly exciting to me.
It’s incredibly stressful when the person you love is having a child.
Smell is incredibly important and sensual; it communicates who you are.
There’s only one common element that united every writer I’ve admired… they’re all incredibly well-read.
My grandmother was probably the first person who I thought was beautiful. She was incredibly stylish, she had big hair, big cars. I was probably 3 years old, but she was like a cartoon character. She’d swoop into our lives with presents and boxes, and she always smelled great and looked great.
I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something’s going on, somebody’s going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.
Archaeology can be overlooked as a discipline, I think, but it’s incredibly important to have this other way of approaching the past – not just through historical documents, but through actual physical remains – objects, buildings and the layout of our towns.
My parents are a wonderful mixture of bohemian eccentric, but also incredibly practical and not airy-fairy.
I’m really very lucky. I get to do an awful lot. I’ve been able to make an incredibly wide range of movies and work with an incredible array of people.
I have been incredibly blessed with a mother who supports me 100 percent – she sees nothing but perfection in her daughter.
I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don’t understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.
I was elected to come to an incredibly dysfunctional capital and make the government work better, and that’s what I’m doing.
Filming ‘Doctor Who’ is so incredibly different to ‘Spooks.’ Near to the surface, there’s quite a silly atmosphere. A lot of the times, you’re on the verge of giggles because it’s so over the top.
I adore the incredibly tight clothing! My own wardobe’s changed – I’ve streamlined a little bit and definitely learnt from Joan’s sleekiness and tailoring.
Kmart is incredibly supportive of the Hispanic community and is therefore an ideal partner for my exclusive collection.
I’m incredibly cheesy. I’m all about happy endings and all of that.
I enjoy dating. I love first dates. I think they’re incredibly fascinating studies in human psychology. When you sit down across from someone on a first date and things are going alright, you talk objectives. We want to win each other over, so how do you win someone over? You have to put the best foot forward.
I’m getting better now, but I used to be incredibly awkward with girls. I think any guy who says ‘I’ve never had an awkward moment with a girl’ is a liar.
She is incredibly fit, but we remind staff that she’s not just the monarch, but our mother.
I was incredibly – I’ve never been more confident of anything in my life that Hillary Clinton was going to win and Donald Trump would lose by a very large margin.
When you arrive in L.A. as an Englishman, you might as well be on the moon. People just don’t understand you if you speak too fast, and most people there think you’re Australian. Ordering was incredibly complicated. I was speechless.
I’m incredibly happy to be doing my own thing in New York.
When I read that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 had disappeared – a state-of-the-art Boeing 777, said to be an incredibly safe way to travel – I waited patiently for the chance to learn what happened.
I was incredibly determined – I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children’s book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children’s division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children’s book for a series she was doing.
Being attractive, it’s not something I do consciously. It’s incredibly flattering that people think I appeal to women. But that was a gift from my parents.
It’s incredibly unfair. You don’t see a lot of 60-year-old women with 20-year-old men onscreen.
I, for one, am actually still incredibly idealistic, and I still can credibly or very strongly believe that you have to keep fighting for what you believe in, because it’s only when you stop that you’ve truly lost.
I think Maje typifies that French vibe where it’s simple items that are very practical, very wearable but also, like, incredibly chic and expensive-looking.
I don’t think it’s an incredibly radical premise to try and have sympathy for someone who has made a mistake.
When you’re learning, especially to write, unless you’re some incredibly gifted writer, a young Malcom Gladwell, say, you need to be imitating people. You need to be imitating how they make their work, how they structure it, how they design the pieces. It gives you chops; it gives you moves.
Writing an encyclopedia is hard. To do anywhere near a decent job, you have to know a great deal of information about an incredibly wide variety of subjects. Writing so much text is difficult, but doing all the background research seems impossible.
I might act like it’s an accident but the opposite is true. I’m incredibly calculated when it comes to my career.
I believe that there is some spiritual entity that’s greater than us. I do not belong to any specific organized religion. I have always believed that, and I believe it even more so now. I believe that someone was listening to me, and someone is giving me an incredibly blessed life.
Staging Formula One is incredibly expensive.
The ability to touch people and literally change lives is incredibly relevant in a consumer-products company.
People really do make the assumption that I had some weirdo Hollywood upbringing, but my parents are incredibly down-to-earth people who worked really hard to raise us in a way that was health.
I taught myself to play the guitar by listening to Paul Simon records, working it out note by note. He is an incredibly intelligent musician. He’s not someone who has a natural outpouring of melody like McCartney or Dylan, who are just terribly prolific with musical ideas.
I was a mixture of being incredibly old for my age and incredibly backwards. I was born quite old, but then I stopped growing. I lived with my mum and dad till I was 30.
The person that was closest to me growing up was my sister, who died at 19. She was an incredibly powerful girl, deeply committed to art and literature.
‘Crash’ was incredibly personal to me. So was ‘In the Valley of Elah.’ There were things in ‘The Next Three Days’ that were questions I was asking myself but couldn’t answer, like how far would you go for love? Can you believe in somebody who can’t even believe in themselves? But this is highly personal.
Everything about filmmaking is incredibly weird, and there’s nothing natural about watching yourself on the big screen or hearing your voice. It’s that same thing that you feel when you watch yourself on a video camera and you hate the sound of your voice – it’s that times 800.
Some of my first teachers were incredibly tough. You could never sing more than three words without being stopped and having to do it over 20 times. I loved that – that sort of process of dissecting and trying to figure out and master this incredibly mysterious instrument.
Making films can be absolutely fantastic, but it can also be incredibly dull. You spend the whole day sitting by yourself in your trailer and then you get called to deliver one sentence – then you’re told to come back and do it again at 5:30 the following morning.
