You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water - an inch deep and then the mud.
I'm not here for your amusement. You're here for mine.
I find it amusing that I'm on the Internet now, because I've criticized it, but mainly I've criticized it on the basis of, 'What are you going to do with it?'
We need to make friends with ourselves. We are stuck with our self all day, so let's be kinder, gentler, more amusing company. Let's take our own hand and say, 'There, there, sister. You're doing a good job. I'm proud of how you're handling all this craziness down here. Don't give up. Carry on, warrior.'
If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.
I had an audition for Mary Jane Watson in 'Spiderman' and ended up playing Betty Brant in that series. I auditioned for Amy Adams' role in 'Catch Me If You Can' and, you know, ended up playing the bank teller. So there were a lot of times early on where I felt like I was always sort of the bridesmaid, never the bride - never quite right.
If you recall, we have a huge list of celebrities who had announced they'd leave the country if Trump won. It probably seemed like a safe play for attention at the time, but now they've got egg on their faces, because, of course, none of them are actually leaving. Some of them have gone silent, while others, like Amy Schumer, say it was a joke.
I've listened to 'Frank' so many times. She was so honest and herself. I think one of the hardest things for an artist to do is tell the truth, but that's what Amy Winehouse did, and it's what I want to do - if you want to write songs that connect with people, I think they really need to believe what you're talking about.
I always listen to all kinds of different music from different years. I listen to the contemporary, but once in a while into eighties, you know just for fun, and sometimes classical too. So I have this big mix on my i-pod... Amy Winehouse, Gwen Stefani, OutKast, Jay-Z. I listen to trance, pop, everything. It really depends on my mood.
Amy Winehouse asked me a while ago if I had written any new songs. I played her something, and when I had finished, she looked at me and said, 'Is that it? Is that all you've got?'
There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture - that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible.
When you're recording to analog tape, it captures performance and you can't necessarily manipulate that in different ways. It is what it is.
No one has any faith in the tape anymore - everyone just relies on computers and considers the hardrive to be the safest option, and I don't. I think an analog tape is something you can hold.
A lot of the records you buy, there's nothing you can hold in your hand, it's all 1's and 0's, this digital cloud floating in the ether. but with analog albums, you can hold it in your hand.
I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well.
I always think of albums as the format. I think it's perfect. I don't think you can tamper with that. It's not just sound, the analog, which is so much richer. It's the format. You're constrained by just 45 minutes, and it's perfect to me. I don't want to listen to any more than, and I live and breathe music.
Light is one of the basic areas that will give you comfort, but it is undergoing a technological revolution in moving from conventional lighting to semiconductor-based lighting, and as it does that, it is becoming intelligent with the transition from analogue to digital.
If you are willing to take the trip through 'Analogue,' you'll be rewarded with some of the best writing in gaming today and a look into the future of what kind of meaningful stories video games are capable of telling.
You all know that each title in the Chronicles has a chess theme; that's partly because of the overall design of the Chronicles themselves - the game of chess as an analogue of the game of life.
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
