I just find P.J. Harvey so mesmerising to watch because she remains unfathomable. She is the kind of woman who makes you rue the day you weren't born her. She always seems to be the cat that walks alone, and you don't feel you are supposed to know her.
Do I wake up every day and thank God that I live in 21st-century Britain? Of course not. But from time to time, I recognise it as an unfathomable privilege.
I was living as a young single mom. I was 19 when I was divorced, and my daughter was a year old, and I waited tables here three to four nights a week for several years while I was trying to support myself and my daughter and the day I got that acceptance at Harvard Law School was an unforgettable day.
Ever since I was little, my mum used to choose an outfit for me and lay it on the bed so I'd know what I was wearing the next day. I never went to a uniformed school, so I always had an outfit - and I never really grew out of that, I don't think.
From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.
When you're done with a job, even if you do stay in contact with certain people, it's never quite the same. It's a unique experience when you're working on a film or a television show together. You're together for 16 hours every day, sometimes six days a week. You're just never going to have that proximity again. So you miss people.
Pearl Harbor? Michael Bay doing a movie about the single most devastating, most holy day in United States military history? Why, that's like the Three Stooges doing a Holocaust movie. Or Barney doing 'Hamlet'.
When I heard 'Dookie' by Green Day for the first time, it unlocked something in me, like, it's totally okay that I'm a little bit weird because these guys are a little bit weird. It made me want to pick up an instrument and do that.
Scores of Congolese die each day unnecessarily due to the lack of access to healthcare and modern medicine.
I would say 'competence' actually might be slightly more important than passion. I understand that it is important to feel strongly about things, but give me a competent dentist over a passionate dentist any day, if only because something about the phrase 'passionate dentist' is deeply unnerving.
We're plugged in 24 hours a day now. We're all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not. And if we can't unplug from that machine, eventually we're going to become mindless.
I want more unpredictability. I want more realism. I think the fans would appreciate that, and that's what I've brought since day one.
People are unpredictable at the end of the day.
I've seen guys sit the whole day doing nothing, and I hate it when people are unproductive. I don't like a guy who sits on the couch all day.
I have 40 years of unpublished material, the ones they don't pick, and the reason I don't redraw them or use them again is that I like to use my brain every day and come up with new jokes.
I had left the music industry at the end of 2001, after 10 years, and had spent three years writing every single day - producing two unpublished novels, one abandoned novel, and three unproduced screenplays. The word 'no' and I were on more than nodding terms. The word 'no' and I were talking about going on holiday together.
Every writer, no matter published, unpublished, award-winning, or bestselling, faces insecurity. It crops up everywhere and, in my personal experience, nearly every day. It's just a part of the process.
The statements of four witnesses of unquestioned integrity, traveling with me that day, attest that such comments were never made and confirm that it simply did not happen.
As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity.
I'm constantly unsatisfied with any situation, which is both good and bad, because never being fully happy drives me to better every day... but I don't enjoy the things that I do even when I do them great.
