Lyrically, I think I’m frustrated with this whole process of trying to figure out what I believe about the world and life. I don’t like to adopt a sort of guiding philosophy.
When you set goals and you reach those goals in mid-August and early September, there’s nothing to look forward to. You sort of lose your drive.
One nuclear war is going to be the last nuclear – the last war, frankly, if it really gets out of hand. And I just don’t think we ought to be prepared to accept that sort of thing.
But yeah, it’s funny because I used to talk so fast before ‘Gilmore Girls’ and it took me several years of auditioning and being comfortable in auditions to sort of take my time because I would just go into it and rush, rush, rush.
These are all voluntary resources which help parents sort out the choices without infringing on the artists’ rights to free speech, which is something that we respect.
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
I’ve always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor – I never would have imagined that. Writing books – I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. – I’m not sure I would even have imagined that. I’ve lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.
Some people don’t like long bus rides, but I love them. There’s sort of a sense of solitude.
I think I’ve got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn’t read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anything and everything that he had to work with.
Time spent in nature is the most cost-effective and powerful way to counteract the burnout and sort of depression that we feel when we sit in front of a computer all day.
I sort of knew I was a bit of a drama queen. I always threw tantrums, so I knew I wasn’t a normal child.
I like to go and do something adventurous. I like to go out and do some sort of crazy activity.
I didn’t know what to expect from a famous movie star; maybe that he’d be sort of stuck-up, you know. But not Gary Cooper. He horsed around so much… that I had a hard time painting him.
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.
For me, collages manage to – it satisfies all of my madness, like I’m able to make these obsessive things, but then I’m also able to make these very strong statements. I don’t know what they mean to other people, but in my mind, they have a very strong particular resonance; there’s sort of a power.
My extreme characters are in a state of rebellion or who are being ostracized or being misunderstood, or misfits or trying to fit in and fighting for their rights to love, live, and co-exist. They sort of mirror my own demons.
If I’m hip, we’ve got a problem in this country. I really shouldn’t be held up as any model of hipness. If anything, I think I’m sort of old school in my approach to objective reporting and not wearing my opinion on my sleeve. There’s a lot of that in American TV news these days. Too much, in fact.
I’m from a family of doctors, and I think they really wanted me to be a doctor. I even sort of assumed I would be a doctor.
It is a process of discovery. It’s being quiet enough and undisturbed enough for a period of time so that the songs can begin to sort of peek out, and you begin to have emotional experiences in a musical way.
Engineering training deals with the exact sciences. That sort of exactness makes for truth and conscience. It might be good for the world if more men had that sort of mental start in life even if they did not pursue the profession.
Religion, any religion, no matter what sort of wonderful religion, never be universal. So now education is universal, so we have to sort of find ways and means through education system, from kindergarten up to university level, to make awareness these good things, the values, inner values.
So I always respected the guys who were trying to do it on their own without taking a handout from a big organization. They were trying to create their own thing, the DIY style, which is sort of always been my style, kind of a makeshift survival mode and really just kind of forging your own path.
I don’t really mind not being a part of a film – because if there is no part for me, I will never force myself upon a film. I feel like it’s just a distraction. If it is not organically incorporated into the story, it just feels like a stupid appearance, like a sort of wink. I hate that.
Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
Not to sound too Dr. Phil all of a sudden, but I think the key to survival is to embrace one’s past and to not run away from it. And to come to some sort of relationship with it or understanding of it.
I’ve learned a lot of sleight of hand and coin tricks, but as far as the occult is concerned, I have not dabbled. I’m sort of an internal skeptic about those things.
Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do. It’s an older country, and they’ve learned to celebrate dinner and lunch, whereas we sort of eat as quickly as we can to get through it.
I try to write lyrics so that they won’t age, which sort of leaves you with the big subjects like death and love and sex and violence.
But Portugal has a peaceful feel about it. I sit on the terrace overlooking the vineyard there and I feel cut off from the world. You need that sort of thing.
In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.
When you’re with a group of semi-psychotic people, you kind of lose track of reality; it’s almost like being in some sort of cult or something.
As a young teen, Satan and the idea of some sort of world that you could be in touch with that could empower you was very much the symbol for freedom.
Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.
There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.
I’m very into my cars. I always ready the Top Gear magazines just to see what cars are out next and what sort of performance they give. It can range from the smallest cars to the biggest ones.
I talk a lot about the men in my family because my mother died when I was little, and my grandmother died when my aunts were little, so we didn’t have those kinds of heads of household. But all the members of our household who were female were sort of living as equal and as wise as the male figures in our family.
I’m sick of having an opinion on everything. Getting older, you learn all sorts of things you’re supposed to, but I feel like it’s time, when you get older, through experience, to… I started to feel quite… what’s the word? … intimidated by seeing both sides of everything.
You’ve got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume – they need to know who the character is, what they’re like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.
I’ll tell you sort of an odd story: My music taste changed on 9/11. And it’s very strange. I actually intellectually find this very curious. But on 9/11, I didn’t like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me.
You can’t just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can’t incite people to crime. There’s all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified in the British common-law system.
I’m not saying that it’s wrong to make huge Hollywood films but it’s just a different kind of feeling, a different sort of pleasure.
F1, we have all sorts of teams with different characteristics. They operate in different countries, under different legislation and with their own ways of working.
I think a certain amount of anger has been a fuel of mine, if you want – but also some sort of sadness, and plain mischief, of course.
The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It’s almost theatrical.
I’ll get cast occasionally as sort of the jerk version of myself, and I have fun doing that. But it’s really better for everyone if I stay behind the camera.
There is no decision that we can make that doesn’t come with some sort of balance or sacrifice.
I used to have a sort of spiky haircut and it just feels better to have short hair again.
Sketching is like dancing. It’s process as much as product. You can turn your head off and just sort of dissolve into the now. Doing a giant, super thought-out painting is the opposite of that.
