You are, at this moment, standing, right in the middle of your own 'acres of diamonds.'
It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts, which was the way we did before 9/11, and then looking at 9/11 and saying, 'This is not a criminal act,' not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan, kill 3,000 Americans, blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war.
To look out of a car in Scania, you see a painting on the horizontal - one windmill, one tiny farmhouse, acres of beet or grass.
When I started at Pratt, Spike Lee had his 40 Acres and A Mule studios down the street. You'd see Rosie Perez walking around going to Mike's Coffee Shop. So it was this black bohemian.
You've got a global food problem. You've got a food problem in the United States. You've got a food problem in Africa... in Asia. And so the truth is, the U.S. is going to have to produce more, on not very many more acres, honestly. And so we're going to have to do a better job.
If you have 100 acres worth of food, and you've got 500 animals out there, the young ones and the old ones are going to starve to death because they can't compete. When they starve, they start to eat things they shouldn't be eating and spread disease not only to them but to us.
I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You can't truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.
Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.
Let me even say before I even get inaugurated, during the transition we are going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America.
Doing stand-up is like running across a frozen pond with the ice breaking behind you. I love it because it's dangerous.
You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.
The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.
Everybody has their own style. If you went to the movies every week and everybody acted the same way Tom Cruise did, boy, wouldn't that suck?
I left school and couldn't find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I've always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.
Acting isn't something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you're going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.
I enjoy acting when you really hit it right.
There is a need for aloneness, which I don't think most people realise for an actor. It's almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you'll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you're acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They'd all like sort of a chunk of you.
Acting is different from stand-up. It gives you this ability to enter into another character, to create another person.
