Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging - weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn't want to do. I'm very grateful to him, actually.
It's weird to me when an artist comes in, and the label says, 'We want him to sound like Chris Brown,' but he says he wants to sound like Sean Paul. There's a huge disconnect - it's like we're making a product.
My favorite song is 'No Air,' a duet I did with Chris Brown. I don't want to sound weird or anything, but I listen to it a lot - it's always on my iPod!
I think part of the reason ideas haven't come in is that the world of cinema is changing so drastically, and in a weird way, feature films I think have become cheap. Everything is kind of throwaway. It's experienced and then forgotten.
How do we refresh our language? Why do we still use, like, a 150-year-old classification system to talk about people? It's so weird! We still call people black and white?
I had it in my contract with CBS, a very weird clause that was never written before and certainly not since, that if I wanted to do a variety show within the first five years of the contract, CBS would have to put it on for 30 shows.
At first it was exhilarating but when I realized it wasn't going away, it became scary and claustrophobic. Fame is a weird thing.
If you get your teeth cleaned on Instagram live, it shows that you're just out of touch. That doesn't make you relatable or cool. It just makes you weird.
Perhaps my favourite story is 'Le Passe-Muraille' by Marcel Ayme. It's about a guy who wakes up with a weird faculty that means he can walk through walls. He's a very shy clerk, and he uses it to get revenge, or vent his frustration.
The thing is, comedy's gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness.
There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story: one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax.
I'm really interested in kind of weird social situations and cliques, watching girls vying for attention, watching how the popularity thing happens. I've always thought too hard about everything.
When I think about a book like 'A Clockwork Orange,' which I really loved, the weird hybrid language is what I remember most.
A weird side effect of being in close proximity to death is an urgency.
For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal.
I skipped kindergarten because I was reading at a pretty high level. That's a weird and cocky thing to say, but I was real sharp, and I knew that early on.
It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city.
It's weird when you get roles that coincide with your life.
I'm at like 325 pairs right now, give or take. But I've given away about 200 pairs of sneakers. I'm not as big of a collector as I used to be, because I think the game just got weird. Everybody likes to collect now, so it's kind of corny. But I got the essentials.
I've been trying to find women writers for my staff for a while now and I have three women on my staff and three guys so it's pretty equal. I don't know why that is. It's been the same thing for a while. It's hard for female comedians to stand out. That's weird. That's a shame.
