Time

Americans have been remarkably devoted to the capacity for belief, to idealism. That's why we get into trouble all the time. We're always viewed as naive.

This is not the first time in my life where you know going into a job that you're going to hear in stereo what was wrong with what you did.

I tried the paleo diet, which is the caveman diet - lots of meat. And I tried the calorie restriction diet: The idea is that if you eat very, very little - if you're on the verge of starvation, you will live a very long time, whether or not you want to, of course.

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

It's when children are 15, 16 or 17 that they decide whether they want to be a doctor, an engineer, a politician or go to the Mars or moon. That is the time they start having a dream, and that's the time you can work on them. You can help them shape their dreams.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight, at times, I start at 11.

I have an inner satisfaction of having done what I thought was right at the time which I thought was propitious.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.

After a point of time, when you get success and fame, money and everything, the purpose of life has to be redefined. For me, I think that purpose is to build bridges. Artists can do that very easily, more than politicians.

Every time I sit for a song, I feel I am finished. It's like a beggar sitting waiting for God to fill your bowl with the right thought. In every song, I ask help from Him. Everybody around is so good, so to create music that will connect with so many people is not humanly possible without inspiration.

I believe that whatever comes at a particular time is a blessing from God.

I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.

I have too many responsibilities and principles. There's no time for 'guilty' pleasures.

For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made, it was not a sentient being, a man was not a machine.

I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.

Clark Gable seemed fascinating all his life because there wasn't so much information about him. Today, you're on television all the time.

I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.

Because I came out as a singer, I took the time to get an acting coach.

Romeo Must Die came at the right time. It was the right vehicle for me.

Sometimes when it comes to the iconic kind of moments, when I read the script for the first time, you get little goose bumps or something because it really is kind of exciting.

I've had my run in with trouble. Fortunately, you know, one slap on the hand is usually the last time for me... I learned my lesson.

The scale of time for a politician runs between one primary and the next, and in Israel, this means two to three years because elections almost never take place once every four years as stipulated by law. The timetable for a system of research is completely different.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

If I realize that actually there's quantum mechanics happening around us all the time in some macroscopic, interconnected way, then that doesn't change my perception of it, that doesn't change my interaction with it, it just changes how I view my interaction.

It's much like playing jazz, flying. It's multitasking in real time. You have a number of instruments that alone won't tell you exactly what the airplane is doing but together give you a picture of everything that's going on.

I love going to conventions, and I love spending time with the fans and going to parts of the world where I wouldn't normally go.

I grew up playing hockey and some football, and I always think about the first time you walk into the locker room on a new team. The cliques are looking at you funny, and you make one friend, but then they're trying to stab you in the back.

A film has its own life and takes its own time.

The work requires a moderately large investment in technological and theoretical developments and long periods of time to carry them out, without the pressure to achieve quick or short term results.

As a kid, I was always into art at the same time as computers, and eventually I realised I was making more interesting stuff with my keyboard than with my hands. I really enjoyed modifying computer games more than playing them, so that got me into programming.

I grew up with the idea of the cyborg and the robot, but at the same time I felt this intense disconnection between the things I was engaged with and inspired by in terms of fun and play. It seemed like paintings and drawings were so static.

I went to the opening of 'Sister Act,' and I had such a great time. I had no idea what it was about, and I had never seen the movies. But I heard the show went through some major last-minute craziness in previews, and man, opening night was really fun and really entertaining.

Women are just so much tougher and more patient than men are - their capacity for empathy blows me away. And their capacity to deal with stress for long periods of time is also kind of awe inspiring.

It's not accidental that products get worse over time, it's because companies stop paying attention to them. They stop caring as much about maintaining the same quality they did when they were just trying to fight for survival and no one would pay attention unless they had the best technology.

My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don't have time for nonwork stuff.

My mom is proud of me. But she might not be too happy about the hours I keep or how little I eat. I wake up so late that it would be inappropriate to have breakfast. At most, I will have a snack in the day and dinner. I realize that it's not the healthiest way to live, but it's all I really have time for.

Steve Jobs is the most epic entrepreneur of all time. He served as a guiding light for any emerging businessperson who wanted to learn how things should get done. He'll be looked at as one of the best business leaders of all time, and certainly one of the best tech entrepreneurs.

You know, every time a summer movie comes out, people think they're gonna get rich off of the merchandise.

The first time I recorded without Allen Toussaint, I wanted to do doo-wop. Everything I've done since then has got some kind of doo-wop essence in it.

When you were a kid, a day was a long time and a year was a long time.

'Yellow Moon' was a poem. My wife at the time, Joel - she's dead now - it was our 25th anniversary. She had the chance to go on a cruise with her sister. And I'm home with the kids and looking up, and I saw the big moon, and I just started writing.

I wanted to build a tool for my generation: people 20 to 40 who don't want to spend time balancing a checkbook or checking multiple financial institutions' websites. Mint does just that, giving comprehensive, quick insights into a user's finances from their computer, mobile phone and/or tablet.

I've been spending quite a bit of time in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the U.K. as Mint is expanding globally, and I'm personally doing much of the research and business deals to make them happen.

Kevin Systrom of Instagram used to work for us as a consultant in the early days of Mint. I knew him a long time ago. Maybe I could have gotten in there. But with photo sharing, I don't know if there's an obvious business model. I don't think there's a competitive, sustainable advantage.

The typical workday, particularly in startup mode, is from nine to six or nine to seven, then you take a two-hour break to work out and eat dinner. By that time, you're relaxed, and then you work until midnight or one A.M. If there was no break with physical activity, you'd be more tired and less alert.

I always gravitate towards the independent side of things, just because those are the stories I always fall in love with, but you don't really get paid, and living in Los Angeles is expensive, and I have a mortgage to pay. So it's good to jump onto a studio film and then in all my other time do small passion projects.

I rode a shark once. I wouldn't recommend it. It was fun, but I thought I was going to get eaten the entire time! Nothing against sharks. I love sharks. I just don't think we are meant to ride them.

I think as you get older, you realize there's always going to be critics. Critics are going to win every time because they can change their critique based on the stats and their own personal feelings.

I've spent years trying to time up my drops with my throws. You learn to listen to your feet and trust your positions.

The majority of the time, they take air out of the football. I think that, for me, is a disadvantage.

You talk all the time about being connected, being a unit, believing in each other. But if you have unnamed sources, people out there cutting you down, and then you find out it's the person calling the plays - that would be really hard to deal with, to look at him the same way.

When I was a teenager, I worked in New Orleans for a chef named Paul Prudhomme. That was a very important time in my life as a chef. I developed my palate and learned a lot. And here I am now. I specialize in modern Mexican and contemporary Latin cuisines.

I used to be able to eat and drink whatever I wanted. But now, when I'm in a suit and tie all the time, sitting and being driven, you can just feel your body.

My only personal time is a couple of hours in the gym in the morning.

When I travel overseas on many occasions, I get pulled out because I may be buying a one-way ticket, I may be traveling with my sister and we have different last names. That's smart profiling. Just pulling people out one at a time when we have millions of passengers in random screenings I'm not sure is the best way to do it.

Any time you get two people in a room who disagree about anything, the time of day, there is a scene to be written. That's what I look for.

I do not diminish the incredible symbolic importance of a black man getting elected president. But my euphoria was a smart guy getting elected president. Maybe for the first time in my lifetime we had elected one of the thousand smartest Americans president.

I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white, and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent, and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.

I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.

I've got plenty of quirks. I go to an office early in the morning. Early in the morning is really good writing time. I take anywhere between six to eight showers a day. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not a germaphobe: it's all about a fresh start.

Nowadays, people always say, how come he's doing such young shows? But they never mention The Mod Squad. I was very proud of that show. It's the first time an African-American guy kissed a white girl.

Right now I'm doing four shows at a time, trying to read four outlines every week, four scripts every week, and watching four rough cuts, it's a lot of good work. It's fun to do it, but it does wear you out.

There are a couple of things that I'm sure people don't think are important, but I do. I don't like hair changes unless there's a reason for it. Clothing - I don't like to see an outfit worn more than one time in an hour - you can wear it again a few weeks later.

You have to find it in the moment, and that's one of the challenges of being an actor - especially a film actor - is that you have to maintain these heightened emotions for long periods of time. There's no trick to it. You just have to do.

We have the ability to be able, if we have the right resources around us, to really do chop and change and have fun in our time and not just be stuck in one world or the other.

Coming from a background of being onstage, you're onstage for two and a half hours and you're in it for the whole time no matter what you're doing. Even if you don't have a line, you have to stay in it.

My favorite types of movies definitely aren't thrillers, but at the same time you can't deny the genius of Hitchcock's films.

Time and again these governments have rejected proposals today - and longed for them tomorrow.

Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.

I spend a lot of time doing carpentry. Sometimes there is nothing that gives me the contentment that sawing a piece of wood does.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

After the war, prompted by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, I entered Parliament so that a priest could speak out for the poor, as canon law at that time still permitted.

I went to Rosemary Beach, Florida, for the first time in the spring of 2012.

I'm so thankful for that struggling period. That time is really great where you have no idea what's going to happen.

I think as a child you know when it's time for your parents to split. You realise they love each other, but they're not in love with each other. And I think as a child it's much better for your parents to split than for them to stay and have dysfunction within the family.

I'm a vegetarian and very much active in regards to how I feel about animal rights and protecting animals and giving animals a voice. But at the same time, I appreciate and respect other people's decisions to eat meat. The only thing that I hope is that people are educated, that they're aware, that they're living a conscious lifestyle.

Whenever I am acting, it's everything, you know. If I'm researching a role, I'm completely consumed in that and, between action and cut, I live in this suspended time.

I am not a politician by nature, but I will say I think there need to be more women in FIFA, and I would be open to having those conversations when the time is right.

I really enjoy helping people out, and I enjoy time spent with kids.

One thing I love to do when I'm working out is take my watch off, take my heart strap off, and just run - not for time, not for exertion, but just to get the blood flowing.

There is no doubt that counterterrorism takes time because it is not action against a regular army.

In the U.A.E. we were the least-regulated environment in the region, and over time we are seeing more and more regulation coming in. On the other hand, a central bank can overregulate and choke the economy, and then we will have a dead banking industry.

But I have always said that it's important we must make sure that justice is at all time be maintained.

I believe it is an important project, it makes the cost of doing business lower and they will make us more competitive at the same time, it will also provide some satisfaction to the people who demand services for them of the quality they want and also quickly.

When time and space and change converge, we find place. We arrive in Place when we resolve things. Place is peace of mind and understanding. Place is knowledge of self. Place is resolution.

They took away time, and they gave us the clock.

Jerusalem is a time bomb that I fear is just waiting to go off.

Many occasions I've sat down with Israelis to say, where do you see your country in 10 years time, and work me back, so we can figure out the synergies and the connections between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. No Israeli has ever been able to answer that question.

Jordan has to show the Arab world that there's another way of doing things. We're a monarchy, yes, but if we can show democracy that leads to a two-, three-, four-party system - left, right and center - in a couple of years' time, then the Muslim Brotherhood will no longer be something to contend with.

When I talk to people in need, they tell me they want to hope, they are eager for opportunity, they are ready for better days. And I can tell you that every time their hopes are disappointed, all nations lose.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

I think it's important for an actor to see the work they've done because every time you revisit a work you come up with a new way of improving it. It's a good way to brush up your craft and your skills, so I think it's a good thing to do, keep seeing your films.

The joy and happiness it gives you or the emotions you go through when you hold your child in your arms for the first time are indescribable! I really thought that there was going be this moment when a ray of light from heaven would come pouring in, background music would start playing with angels singing, but none of that happens!

The main objective of our cinema is to entertain. If you can pass on a message at the same time, that is fantastic, but if the audience does not feel they are going to be entertained by the film, they are not going to watch it. There are many examples of very responsible and great films that are being made, but nobody goes to watch them.

The trade magazine and all was banned in my house. The first time I read a film magazine was when I was 18.

I'd like to do more TV, TV is completely different than working in movies in a lot of ways, it's like making a really compact movie. Because you don't have as much time, especially hour long shows, they move so quickly.

News reports don't look at the land that existed before a war and the land that exists after a war. Reporting on war is a snapshot in time.

There's a time that may come in an organization where leading by influence is not enough. When things are not going the way they need to go, there's a time when one has to step up... to set the organization back on the right direction.

I was born in Evanston, Illinois. I spent my elementary and part of my junior high school years in a D.C. suburb. And then I spent my high school years in Minnesota. And then I spent my college years in Colorado. And then I spent some time living in China. And then I spent three years in Vermont before moving down to Nashville.

Whenever I visited China in the past, the relationships always felt superficial, there was no time where I felt those moments of conflict and delight that make you feel close to another person. But since I started touring there in 2004, I would always collaborate with local musicians, and that opened up a new level of intimacy.

When I first started playing the banjo and miraculously fell into a record deal in Nashville, TN, there was a period when I didn't go to China. It hurt. Like a pain in my gut... that pain you feel when you know it's time to connect with your parents or your God or your child or your past or your future... and you don't do it.

I loved every day I was in politics. But I got out at the right time. I never miss it.

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education - and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry - shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

Let the people on both sides keep their self-possession, and just as other clouds have cleared away in due time, so will this, and this great nation shall continue to prosper as before.

My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.

The time comes upon every public man when it is best for him to keep his lips closed.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.'

When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day, that by honest work, I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.

A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.

My deceased patients have taught me over the years to believe in the glass half full, to make good use of the time we have, to be generous - that was their lesson for the Uber-mind, and it was free. 'Do that,' they said, 'and then perhaps death shall have no dominion.'

My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.

You can't show up at the bedside and then turn on your skills. You have to keep your game sharp all the time.

Look at the Afghans, during the time of the Soviet invasion. They were among the poorest Muslims in the world, yet they were sustained by their faith in God, and God alone.

We have shown that Islam can rule the world perfectly for 14 centuries, and during this time of Muslim power we did not borrow ideas like democracy from others, so why do we need to learn democracy from them now?

I spend time with people who are movers and shakers, and others who are just friends I really care for. Some of them are rich, some of them are poor. I couldn't care less. I'm not a snob.

Every time Paul and Gene use my makeup, they have to pay me a royalty check. I think they changed the makeup so they didn't have to pay me.

I don't even remember the last time I bought an album, honestly.

I've started getting acclimated to writing on the road and on the spot. I just let whatever I feel at the time come out, instead of really sitting there and taking days to write just one song.

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.

I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show.

During my time I had some very difficult years, and I had very pronounced competition, all by men.

Once, when I tried to calculate the height of the balcony, I broke my arm. Another time, I wanted to see if water moves faster than kerosene. When my father came out to smoke, a fire broke out.

People weren't buying as many records. My record company did not want me. I went through three record companies, went on tour at the wrong time. It destroyed me.

A lot of the television industry is so cookie-cutter. In general, there are so many shows that are easy and bland to watch. You can tune in at any time and know exactly where you are in the story arc because it's pretty much the same every week.

I go to South Dakota for ceremonies when I have the time. And when you learn what the Indian peoples have gone through to hold onto their culture and traditions... wow, it's an amazing story.

When I was sixteen I started acting, and I also started to embrace my tradition and culture. I had a young medicine man interpret for me what it is to be an Indian. He really caught me at a good time because I was really vulnerable after the loss of my parents with all of the feelings of abandonment.

Any time you end a relationship, and everyone has ended plenty in their life, it's always a tough thing and hard to get over.

I like the freedom of podcasting. With podcasting you can really mess around with the form and the format. You can do as much time as you like without having to pause for commercials.

I'm not comically oriented. I get angry and I start complaining and then people start laughing. I don't even want them to laugh half the time.

I'm an internet junkie. There, I said it. That's the first step, right? I also have a thing for making lists. Oh man, nothing beats turning to a fresh, clean page in a notebook, taking out a nice pen, and starting a list. There's so much potential there. So much to do, so little time! So hey, why not spend some of that time making a list.

Our house has a library - it seemed better use of the space than as a dining room! - and I try to spend as much time in there as possible. There's nothing better while reading or writing than to be surrounded by books.

Anything you want to know, you go to Quora and get it. And at the same time, give people a platform that is easy to use for sharing the knowledge.

The area we define as what Quora's good at is long-form text that's useful over time, and where you care about who wrote the text. Not that you need to be friends with them, just that they're someone trustworthy.

One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.

The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.

My favorite sequels are basically all Mike Myers films - 'Wayne's World 2,' 'Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,' 'Shrek 2.' Anything he does, it's best the second time around. He needs to do 'So I Married an Axe Murderer 2.'

People want to be friends with someone who likes to have a good time.

By the time I got into Juilliard, I was working at a Target distribution warehouse. It didn't make anything, it just shipped things, and my job was just to stand there and look at the security codes on the back of trucks and see if they would lock, and check them in.

I auditioned in Chicago for Juilliard and didn't get in. I was basically living in a back room of my parents' house, paying rent and not doing anything with my life. I'd like to say it was patriotic to join the Marines, but it was also that I was doing nothing honorable with my life and spending too much time at McDonald's.

I was living in a small town in Indiana working as a telemarketer and a vacuum salesman. I was really bad: the vacuums seemed to always be falling apart. Every time I did a demonstration, I'd say, 'This is the material the astronauts used on Apollo 13.' And no sooner had that come out of my mouth, something would malfunction.

Just being in the military, you're so violent. We got into fights about just random things all the time. I don't think as aggressively as I did when I was in the Marine Corps.

The first job I got was this TV job in this show called 'The Unusuals.' Then I did a play called 'Slipping,' and at the same time I was rehearsing another play at Playwrights Horizons, and that kind of snowballed into a bunch of plays.

The Marine Corps is some of the best acting training you could have. Having that responsibility for people's lives, suddenly time becomes a really valuable commodity and you want to make the most of it. And for acting, you just have to do the work, just keep doing it.

You have friends, and they die. You have a disease, someone you care about has a disease, Wall Street people are scamming everyone, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer. That's what we're surrounded by all the time.

You have to be forward-moving and able to balance a lot of things at the same time. I attribute a lot of that to the Marine Corps and Juilliard both.

Any time you can get a muscle car back, it's a good thing.

In California, the lines on the road are just a suggestion. They're in the left lane with the left indicator on, so naturally it's time to turn right! Are you kidding me? In your Prius? I know, you're saving the Earth by trying to kill the people!

My dad was a big car guy. If you wanted to spend time with my dad, he was working on the car.

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

I spend a lot of time on my music.

I'm a mad thinker in general. I think about everything, all the time. Especially when I write music, a lot of the influences come from personal experiences or from being on the outside looking in, being that person who witnessed things that stuck with me throughout my life.

Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.

'All-Star Wonder Woman' would get worked on in what is laughably referred to as my 'spare time.' I just ended up with less and less time to devote to it. Eventually, we all realized that it was taking forever, so we just all agreed to hold off on it 'til the time was right to do it properly. Well, I still have a contract, DC never tore it up.

Many of the songs on Undertow were written at the time Opiate came out.

We wanted to take as much time and effort making the video as we did the song.

With four perfectionists in the band, we have a hard time reaching perfection.

About 70 percent of the district was new. It was a short amount of time to get to know hundreds and thousands of people. But with the help and support of old friends, we built a grassroots operation organically from the ground up.

Acting is exciting. It is different every time you do it.

After my tour I had time to stay at home, be with my boyfriend and hang out with friends and that brought me down to earth and helped me write music from a more relaxed place.

I have crushes on women all the time.

I have crushes on women all the time. I don't have intimate relationships with them, but I find women beautiful.

I've been known to make out with girls from time to time. Couple drinks involved, you know. It's fun. And who knows? Maybe it'll go further someday. I don't know.

There was a lot of me trying to be a 'fixer.' I was that kind of guy. I'd meet someone who had 'so much potential' that needed 'help.' I think that was kind of my curse for a long time.

Those shows I did with Queen were pretty surreal. I was really excited and super-flattered, but intimidated at the same time.

When I was kid, I remember playing 'Vogue' by Madonna over and over and over again. And ah, you know, something about the beat was really cool, and Madonna, visually, was on TV all the time and I thought she was just so beautiful.

Because Jews were kicked out of every country in Europe at one time or another, and plenty of other places as well, there isn't an ability to identify with a national heritage - you'll never hear a Jew say 'I'm German' or 'I'm Polish,' without saying something about being Jewish as well, and for good reason.

Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.

Religious traditions are easy to lose sight of in today's marketing frenzy. Make sure you take time to gently usher your little ones into the rituals that have special meaning for you.

You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.

A lot of shorts spend too much time setting up the idea, sometimes they meander.

Any time Chris Nolan wants to call me for advice, he can.

Every time a pundit or elected official is on any TV news program, it should be a polite formality to mention that GE has made such and such billions off the war in Iraq by selling arms or that Murdoch is a right-wing activist with a clear stake in who wins and who taxes his profits the least.

'Firewall' seems both scary and protective at the same time. And how often does that happen within one word besides 'military' and 'government?'

Friends give me a hard time about the pants I'm wearing, which are made in China. Well, how do you find the right clothes? Or the right movie studio? The right people giving you checks? Good luck doing the right thing all the time.

For some reason, people with comedy, any time they can detect a pattern, it kind of freaks them out. 'Those guys are always together!' Yeah, they're a comedy team. Anything they can recognize as a pattern they think is a hole.

I actually opened for Chris Rock at the Funny Bone one time.

It's time Hawaii answer doubters and produce documents proving that it is a state. What are they hiding? And why haven't we seen these documents?

Sometimes I know a joke I'm going to yell out ahead of time, but most of the time it's stream of conscious. You never really know it until you've got everyone dressed up, the set is built, all the extras are here.

The easiest time to be funny is during a fairly serious situation. That way, you can break the ice. It's crazy, but even at funerals, people will get huge laughs.

The threat to Russia isn't liberal Europe or America. It is nonliberal Islam and nonliberal China. Russia has to change. It can't be otherwise. It will take time. You have to be patient.

I take what I see work. I'm a strict believer in the scientific principle of believing nothing, only taking the best evidence available at the present time, interpreting it as best you can, and leaving your mind open to the fact that new evidence will appear tomorrow.

Ever since I was a kid, I've wanted to set a time that nobody can touch for many years.

I like to write about teenagers because it's such an uncertain and dramatic time.

I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive, and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry.

I certainly have a sliver of me, which is definitely American, and feels a great pull towards where I spent time when I was very young, which is in California.

To be honest, unless you rocket straight to stardom as a gorgeous young vampire, you can spend a lot of time working behind a bar.

Natto, Japanese ferment bean paste, will never cross my lips again. Spam Musubi, on the other hand, is something I love. I used to have a roommate of Vietnamese descent, and he would eat it all the time. It looked gross, but I finally had it - wrapped in seaweed and rice - it was terrific.

Now you can get artisanal everything - pickles, coffees, house-cured meats, mustard. The pendulum has swung back to this kind of food, and it gives me the greatest hope for the future, especially because we're living in a time with issues like polluted Gulf Coast seafood and food labeled organic that may not really be organic.

I realised that the only time I really enjoyed music was when I was in the studio writing. So even though it was a six album deal, they saw quite early on that I wasn't enjoying it as I should be. I didn't feel there was anything behind it.

I've never had a chance to sit down and enjoy what's happened - I've been too panicked about the next move. So I took some time out. I thought either I do this now or in 10 years' time I'll end up in the Priory.

During my time at Watchung Hills Regional High School, I was fortunate to have a number of teachers who inspired me and filled me with enthusiasm for learning.