Hip-hop saved me. It gave me permission to use language in a certain way. It validated my community and my friends. It gave our slang a certain elegance.
I wanted to have some disdain in the way that she fights sometimes, because I think Elektra is a bit careless, like, 'You're in my way - get out.'
I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.
By respect for life we become religious in a way that is elementary, profound and alive.
So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us. Because the planet doesn't need to be saved. It doesn't care if all the squirrels, elephants, and trees die and there's just a couple of amoebas floating around at the poles.
The dream, I think, with any project is it starts with an idea, and then somebody writes it, and the writer hopes that a director comes on and makes this piece of material visual, and both the director and writer hope that they can have actors come in and bring something to it that neither one of them expected, elevating it along the way.
Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator's memory.
I was eleven, then I was sixteen. Though no honors came my way, those were the lovely years.
I do say things in a way that is going to elicit a response from people.
The secular elites are so terrified of telling the truth about radical Islam. When you talk about the radical Islamists, we have got to get straight and get serious and talk about it in the right way.
Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.
The elitist way of looking on the runway, frankly, seems old fashioned.
English food writer Elizabeth David, cook and author Richard Olney and the owner of Domaine Tempier Lulu Peyraud have all really inspired the way I think about food.
Like the Elizabeth I play, Queen Elizabeth is a monarch who actually moves with the times. She gets new information, assimilates it, and changes in order the fit in with the way the world is moving. I admire that.
Lupe Velez was way before me; Dolores Del Rio was way before me, so I had no one. So the only one I could think of that I identified with was this gorgeous creature named Elizabeth Taylor, so she became my role model.
But as my voice coach keeps saying, if we actually spoke the way they imagine the Elizabethan voice might have been, we wouldn't be able to understand it.
I always liked Nat King Cole. I always wanted to go my own way, but I always favoured other singers like Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald - I loved Ella Fitzgerald. There are so many of them. Nina Simone was one of my favourites - Johnny Mathis.
Elon Musk wins you over with his elegant mastery of engineering, be it for the rocket or the car. But what blew my socks off was when our conversation veered way off topic. We started musing about whether it was possible we all lived in the matrix, and Musk still had deep knowledge.
Elon Musk is talking about silicon nanoparticles pulsing through our veins to make us sort of semi-cyborg computers. But why not take a noninvasive approach? I've been working and trying to think and invent a way to do this for a number of years and finally happened upon it and left Facebook to do it.
