People don't understand the analogy of football and acting, but there's a great deal of it that's the same. You get dressed in the room, and you think you've got it all prepared, and later on in the game you wish you had put on more pads 'cause they're just kicking the hell out of you. God almighty, I've been beat up by the best.
Reverse-engineer Hollywood is how I think of it. All the social-media stars are going in the back door, and everyone's trying to get in the front - there's a line outside. And then everyone's trying to sneak around back, but then there's security, you know? That's an analogy, I guess.
I stopped performing because I don't have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over and over again. Once I got it right, I didn't want to do it again. I always use the analogy of a novelist who has to read his novel in public night after night. I just didn't want to do it.
The debate analysis in the media is rampant with contest analogies of war, baseball, boxing, football; you name it. Any testosterone contest imaginable is fair game.
It's funny: I've always had the analogy of a snow globe, that Hollywood is a snow globe. No, it's true. If you shake it up, you can look at it and really enjoy it. But don't ever go in. Don't ever buy into it and be like, 'I deserve all of this!' because it can go away at any time, so just have a lot of fun.
I would never really analyse what I do. I leave that to other people - I'm not a critic. I just want to get on with whatever I have in hand, you know? Just try to make the best job of the available material.
How can you analyse what is funny? What's funny to one isn't funny to another... What's funny to you is a personal thing.
Nowadays, with technology coming into cricket, people start to analyse, and if you only have one or two tricks, people will start to line you up.
People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it, you find they're not.
Thinking about death makes you analyse what life is. Anxiety makes you curious, and curiosity leads to understanding. I wouldn't be a writer without depression.
The thing about darts is that you've got to shout. It's not like cricket where you can talk to Michael Atherton and ask him to analyse the bloody nuances. Darts does not have nuances. You've got to hurl yourself at it.
With experience, you understand expectations, you understand consequences, but sometimes it gets a little bit hard, especially for me, that I'm a perfectionist - I want to analyse everything. And sometimes it's most important to just let go and trust your instincts. This is what I need to do more of.
If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you'd think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children.
There is an art to eavesdropping, but I think to some extent we are all guilty of picking up those little odds and ends that can be quite intriguing if you analyse them.
I think that I have self esteem issues, really. If you really analyse it... People who really like me I have no interest in. The unattainable is always that I want to attain.
If you ask a filmmaker to analyse his own film, it would take three or four years to do that, honestly. Because when you make a film, you have to be convinced about it. You are married to that film for a year.
No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
I love books, and all the best ones are people analysing their own emotions. You can learn from that.
I try to keep things simple. Reading and analysing the wicket as soon as possible is important. Sometimes you run after wickets, but I focus on team goals - what the team wants me to do right now.
You can improve in every stage of your career, and even in training, after training, analysing your game, you can do a lot of stuff to make steps, and that's also a major point of becoming a top player.
