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I swim all the time at night - I've always been a water girl. It's a black-bottom pool and my pool light was out, and as I've done a thousand times I just kind of did a little seal dive. I saw a huge bright light and I literally thought, 'That's it.'
The way I work is I'll basically become kind of fixated on a very stripped-down genre, like revenge or something like that, and just start layering on top of that and entering in thoughts and ideas, and then the story just kind of builds up that way.
Our parents more or less just kind of wanted us to pursue our passions. Whatever they would have been, they would have helped light the fire. They are very liberal, artistic people, but they didn't force us into acting. They let us find our own ways.
My grandmother wanted my father to be a teacher because she was a teacher. He didn't go down that road until much later in life; he just kind of retired after almost 20 years as being a visiting lecturer at Stanford, where he got his graduate degree.
And as a result, I guess I'm just kind of a rubberneck. I'm kind of a - someone who likes to see things and likes to see these events and talk to the people who make them happen. But I don't think journalists are as important as the people they cover.
I have this theory that I hold on to, the theory that everything great in art and in life in general is jazz. It's just like all these things that just kind of seem to fall into place. You know, like mistakes that somehow turn into something beautiful.
I think that I've just kind of found my niche, if that makes sense. I still write the same, but I feel like I've found what separates me, and I always try to stay in that when I write. It took me a long time to discover that, so I try to be protective.
I hate performing on live television. It's so scary, because, if you screw up, you don't really get any retakes. So when I do television shows now, having been on 'Idol' really helps me mentally to just kind of take it all in. So I learned a lot from it.
I'm a video game enthusiast. I love video games! They were a huge part of my upbringing in their early form, when I was all about 'Dig Dug' and 'River Raid.' As they evolved, so did my music-making, and we just kind of grew up together like cool friends.
My grandmother and, and her father actually started a scholarship program in our church, you know, obviously, before I was born. And then my mom also owns a preschool, so, you know, education and giving back are just kind of in, in the genes, in a sense.
You know, rap is sort of like a form of talking, right? So it's like you can hear, you know, the slaves doing it. You can hear, like, you know, Africans and Jamaicans doing it just kind of as, like, a rhythmic, poetic conversation, you know, to a rhythm.
I just... my childhood seems, when I look back, to be largely composed of reading, lying on the bed. I mean, my mother was always shouting, 'Go outside!' But she shouted it at all of us. I think I was just kind of... rather an introverted child, probably.
It is a different world than when I was growing up, and you started to just kind of maintain at thirty-five and just hope you can hope it together. People are a lot more vital than I am and doing all kinds of things and leading really important movements.
We always wanted to have this big show. So we just kind of started doing little things, like building our own little props, and starting to put on a show. And we just started seeing the response, and it felt amazing to us, and then I fell in love with it.
I've been in the shallow end of a pool, just kind of walking around, but this was my first time really swimming - and I was horrified! I actually lost it whenever I saw the edge of the pool. But I took baby steps and rewarded myself every step of the way.
It's just kind of ironic with how I came into the NBA with all the expectations. You would've thought coming in the way I did that my career would last long. You'd think I'd have my more peak years in the beginning or middle. Mine just came a little later.
People always talk about 'Oh, it's so nice that you give back.' It just kind of becomes words. When you see it, when you actually put it together and you see the amount of impact you have on a kid, they're going to remember this for the rest of their life.
I don't think Hollywood was trying to do anything with me. In fact, they lost interest pretty quick. I think I got lucky, briefly, in the '90s, and it just so happened that those movies were the opportunities that came my way. Then it just kind of stopped.
That's kind of my job in the writer's room. I'm always the guy going, like, 'People wouldn't say that there. They wouldn't say that.' Like, I hate when I watch sitcoms and something crazy happens, and people just kind of go, 'Huh?' and then they just go on.
I just like Forrest Gump. Maybe I'm a little smarter than him, maybe I'm not. Probably because of the whole Southern aspect of his character and for some reason I always wind up on the better end of all deals... I've just kind of got the old silly boy luck!
Initially I probably didn't even call it acting, but dressing up or something. As a kid I think you fully imagine the world in which you want to inhabit, so you put some clothes on and just kind of freely imagine this world, and it's a total imaginary world.
Some friends of mine bothered me for a long time about getting on the social networking pages. They were close friends that I liked to mess with, and I think that I kind of enjoyed for a while that it bothered them so much. Now they've just kind of given up.
Couples in their 30s are having trouble having kids. And you just kind of extrapolate that and say, 'What if it happened to everybody? What kind of society would it be like if all of a sudden we knew that this was the end of the line - we couldn't have kids?'
'The Muthaship' was an experiment. All my friends are working at Endemol, so they just kind of pushed me into it to see if we could shoot a little web series on an iPhone - and that's what we did: we shot it on an iPhone. So it's so experiential and so silly.
I was tired of just kind of being on that express train, whatever you want to call it, so to speak. It just sort of shoots forward, and you have no creative autonomy, no control over your time, and there's not much time for side projects or family and friends.
I just kind of do my own thing. I'm not trying to be like nobody else or nothing like that. Like when I travel, everybody's like, go to Dubai, it's a new thing. I can go to Dubai, but I'm not going to just because I'm not trying to go where everybody is going.
For me, all my negative thoughts that I have about, 'How did you miss that pitch? Why did you miss that pitch? You shouldn't have missed that pitch.' I just kind of sit there and kind of crush it up, and once I'm done doing that... I just kind of toss it aside.
It was not until Web comics that I saw stories about women and stories by women and things that were aimed specifically at female readership. It was just kind of this free-for-all that was achieving something amazing with creativity. That was where I got my start.
Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind of impossible.
Television is much more of a producer's writer's medium, so a lot of the time, when you're directing a television show, they have a color palette on set or a visual style and dynamic that's already been predetermined, and you just kind of have to follow the rules.
I just feel like if I start opening the door to talking about my university experience, then people just kind of... own everything. There was a lot of stuff a couple of years ago saying that I was bullied at Brown and awful things like that, none of which were true.
I felt like for it to really turn into something, you have to jump in with both feet. And it always turns out a little different than you imagined it, but that's kind of the beauty of it, when you feel musically confident enough to just kind of follow where it goes.
It was more that his career was going down again and he was tired of the songs. He was tired of the routine. And there was a point where he just kind of gave up. He couldn't face being 40. And he resorted to stimulants. There's a dark side there, a really dark side.
Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.
I'm not really one of those people who goes and writes some big back story and agonizes over characters. I think you kind of can get it. For me personally, it's just kind of more instinctive. But I don't have kind of an acting background. I fell into it accidentally.
In the '60s, people were still very protective of each field that they belonged to. Avant-garde artists didn't know about rock or pop or jazz. And the jazz people of course didn't want to know about any other music. They were all just kind of protecting their territory.
Depending on who we're playing, it's just kind of, like, a little starstruck. You know, because these are guys that... I'm playing against Tom Brady or Russell Wilson, Andrew Luck, guys like that that I've been watching since high school, that's been doing crazy things.
As it turns out, one of the biggest choices we have doing the show is deciding the tangents we are allowed to take, the stuff that we see along the way. We're allowed to explore the world at large on these things; the urban-legend aspect of it is just kind of an excuse.
I never really had the chance to play the kind of music I wanted to play. It was always just classical. It had its limits. I play piano now and again in the new forms of music that I actually want to play, but at the time, it was something that I just kind of moved past.
I was in art school since I was five years old. I've always been to art school. Everything that's happened to me, nothing's been planned. I've never had a business plan. I just kind of fell into it, and I liked it, and I took a chance. I took a lot of chances in my life.
But since day one, we've always been kinda up against it. So at the end, it's not surprising that we were kind of led along for so many months and didn't know what the fate of the show was gonna be. It was... in a weird way, just kind of that was the way it's always been.
I'm not a great sleeper. I try and do too many things every day. I think that I get very obsessive about parts and projects. I do let them kind of consume me, and when there's something on the horizon that I want to be involved in, I just kind of hurtle myself towards it.
When I do a 30-minute meal, for instance, on Food Network, that's my food you see at the end of the show and it's not perfect. And if sometimes things break or drop or the pasta hits the wall when I'm draining it, they never stop tape. They just kind of let me go with it.
Mel Brooks is an interesting one because he started out making films about stuff that he was totally affectionate about, like musicals, westerns, horror films, Hitchcock films. And then, as they get further on, and you get to 'Spaceballs,' then it's just kind of contrived.
I grew up, obviously, watching tons of animation; Saturday morning cartoons or anything that we could get our hands on. And then when 'The Simpsons' premiered, that just kind of changed the landscape of everything. We hadn't had prime time animations since 'The Flintstones.'
I got a lot of problems, but I'm really good at intuiting what I need to do to be happy with whatever I create. I know when to stop myself, I know when to start, I know when to leave something alone. I guess I just kind of indulge that completely, and so I just take my time.
I'd like to play a guy who doesn't think so much. I'd like a character whose words come out before he thinks about it. I want a character who is just kind of dumb in that way. A guy who doesn't have too many dangerous, devious ideas. It would be fun to play a role like that.
I tried snowboarding at 14, and I absolutely fell in love with it. I snowboarded every day off I had, every weekend I had off of school, every holiday we had off from school, and it became a huge part of my life, not just what I love to do, but really just kind of who I was.
I've played to audiences where people are sitting there with their arms crossed, just kind of watching. Although they might be having a great time, and they might be really enjoying the spectacle, if I'm not getting anything back, it does affect the way I perform and project.
I think the fact that we don't really... that the world really doesn't acknowledge how bad and how detrimental colonialism was; that people don't really try to explore it, you know, in popular media and news articles; that... that it's just kind of glossed over as this thing.