Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've never translated more than one book by any author. But I'm fascinated by translators who have, like Richard Zenith, who's translated so much of Fernando Pessoa's work. I get restless for a new kind of influence. The books I've translated are books I want to learn from as a writer, to be intoxicated by. And translation is an act of writing in itself. It's an act of recreation - of a writer's cadence and tone and everything that distinguishes the voice in the book.
People want to be the first with the record, they want to be the first to know which songs are on the record, all that kind of stuff. So I like to just stall them a bit. Personally, I love the idea of an album that's completely new, that no one's heard any free downloads, any pre-record releases, all that kind of stuff, and nothing's been played on the radio. Totally virgin, you know, a sealed record. That's my ideal, but it's very hard to get anybody else to agree to do that.
I always feel like I learn more from directors that are new, and I also am able to understand how much I really do know about filmmaking when you work with directors that maybe don't have as much experience, so you're able to sort of take the reins. I know how to do these movies, I've done so many of them and have learned from new directors who are usually willing to try new things and are more open to allowing someone like me to kind of come in and just do what I know how to do.
Russian law on banning nontraditional relationships basically says you cannot have any portrayal, neutral or positive, of homosexual relationships or nontraditional families, period. And you also cannot have negative portrayals of heterosexual relationships. So along the way, the law completely quashes any kind of public discussion on domestic violence. No discussion of relationships at all, unless you want to showcase a heterosexual love story, that preferably involves reproduction.
It's the hardening of these narratives that makes peace so difficult. If each side can see the narrative, the claims that the other has, then there is a much more likely possibility of making a resolution. But what I see is the opposite. There is a total disclaiming of the validity of the other side, and talk that I find really unsettling, the kind of chatter you get from ultra-right Israelis and Hamas is of annihilation. In that kind of dialogue, there's no way to move toward peace.
Mr. Trump wants to turn the U.S. economy into the kind of real estate development that has made him so rich in New York. It will make his fellow developers rich, and it will make the banks that finance this infrastructure rich, but the people are going to have to pay for it in a much higher cost for transportation, much higher cost for all the infrastructure that he’s proposing. You could call Trump's plan "public investment to create private profit". That's really his plan in a summary.
In an odd way I thought I was lowering the bar for myself, in saying, well, I'll make a pop album. But in a way it's kind of harder to make pop music. It's like the more abstract you get with music, you get into that emperor's new clothes thing, where you can go anywhere, and just claim that your audience may not be prepared to go with you. But with pop music, I think everybody understands the form, everybody knows what it's meant to do. So I would say it's harder to write that kind of music.
Frequently, I go straight into the studio and see what's around. I might hire a couple of instruments that I've never used - maybe a particular type of electronic organ or an echo unit. Then I just dabble with sounds until something starts to happen that suggests a texture. The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That's like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage.
There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians.
Somebody I love and have a huge amount of respect for once told me something that, to this day, I don't really think I understand. It was probably toward the end of Harry Potter, and they were talking to me about afterwards and that kind of stuff. And they were saying, "You need to think of yourself as a brand and you need to protect that brand." I just don't understand what that really means in terms of being an actor, and I also think I would find that a slightly soul-destroying way to look at myself.
ll industries have been disrupted and disruption tends to generate gatherings for people to share information. I don't think media are unusual here. Add to that the discovery, or perhaps expansion of the awareness, that events can generate revenue. So now we have companies whose business model is heavily based on events, whether it is Re/code or South by Southwest or many others. Those kinds of gatherings were once more institutionally oriented inside trade associations. Now they have been expanded out.
There are so many varieties of films. You've got the jet-lagged films, where you fly to Bulgaria or wherever and get off the plane, and they bring you right to the set, and you start working, even though I don't even know my name, it's been such a long flight. Then there's the alimony films. But after you've been doing this long enough, you've gotten into every kind of situation you can imagine, even to the point where there is basically no script, so you have to kind of do it scene by scene and survive.
When I was auditioning for Divergent, I was kind of in the dumps. I wasn't really happy with acting, and I didn't know if I wanted to do it anymore. I went on a bunch of auditions and nothing worked out. Then they said, "Hey, you got a callback for this thing, Divergent." Because I was in such a weird place in my life, I didn't look up what it was about, didn't look up the director, didn't look up that Shai Woodley was a part of it. I read the script, obviously, but I closed myself off from anything else.
Anything that we know how we do, machines will do better. Now, the key element of this phrase is, "We know how we do it." Because we do many things without knowing exactly how we do them. So this is the area where machines are vulnerable, because it still has to learn from some kind of experience. It needs something - at least the rules of the game. You have to bring in something that will help the machine to start learning. It's like square one. If there's nothing there, if you can't explain it, that's a problem.
The expense of getting into space is the rocket launch, the rocket itself. Rocket's right now, commercial rockets cost probably somewhere between $50, or $120, or $150 million per launch. And those are all expendable. That is, you've got to buy a new rocket for each launch. So, that really is the critical part. If there was some kind of really, a revolutionary breakthrough and the price of rockets fell by an order of magnitude, I mean, just imagine what that would do as far as getting access to more ordinary people.
It's kind of like being a writer in the sense that you always hear other writers say, 'Well, the best way to start writing is to just start writing.' The same goes for improvisation. You want to start improvising, just start playing notes. And the more you do that, the more comfortable - or not comfortable - but I guess how you're able to adapt to situations. You become more familiar with your instrument. As soon as you have a musical thought, you can go ahead and add to that musical thought and know your way around.
Even though it took forever to release a movie, and even though it's a small indie release, the fact that in five years someone will be skipping through Netflix, or Amazon, or whatever and say, "Wow, that was a really cool movie. That was a really great story. Or I was really creeped out, or intrigued by that." You almost kind of forget what it took to get there, or was it in the theaters or not. So that's kind of exciting as a filmmaker. That it doesn't really matter as much the release platform, as much as how can I see it?
Normally my process is to sit in a room and read a script and talk about it and ask questions and just create a dialogue. That goes all the way through shooting. All kinds of thoughts and ideas can find their way in there. As long as you're all on - We're just all trying to tell the story so my job as a director is just to find out what this film wants to be based on, it's just words on a page at some point but then it just needs to go to some level of believable storytelling. I'm discovering the film as I make it, to some degree.
When you're working on a scene, both in the script phase and also in the moment, you look around and you wait for the lightning bolt to strike you and based on your instincts tell you what the right thing to do is here. And that can result in anything from a change of dialogue to the realisation that what you thought was a dramatic scene should actually have some humour. And maybe if you stage it this way it's funnier, or if you put the camera here it tells a different story. That stuff is kind of everything when you're a director.
Kurds are going to have to strike a bargain with Bashar Assad that will keep them in the Syrian state and under some kind of Syrian authority, so that they can have the protection of international legitimacy and the Syrian army against the Turks. How they can bargain with Assad is unclear. What kind of negotiations they can come to, unclear. We will see whether they get something like the Kurds in Iraq, which is a large measure of autonomy, or something less than that. That will be one of the big negotiations to come out of this process.
Normally classical music is set up so you have professionals on a stage and a bunch of audience - it's us versus them. You spend your entire time as an audience member looking at the back of the conductor so you're already aware of a certain kind of hierarchy when you are there: there are people who can do it, who are on stage, and you aren't on stage so you can't do it. There's also a conductor who is telling the people who are onstage exactly what to do and when to do it and so you know that person is more important than the people on stage.
I think I kind of approached music with this sort of, like, weird thing where I kinda set myself up where I could kinda be myself but not really. I kinda had a backdoor out. So if you criticized me, I kinda had my defenses working. And the problem is that some people seize on that as inauthenticity, which is understandable. So that's painful because it's not that you're being inauthentic...there's a difference between being a poseur and being someone who's so emotionally challenged they're kind of just doing their best to show you what they've got.
I'm not talking about Trump's brand but rather the intimately connected brand called "make America great again" that he created to make all these promises to working Americans - is intensely vulnerable, if there is sustained scrutiny of the kind we've seen about Comey and Russia. He's appointed five Goldman Sachs former executives to his Cabinet, his commerce secretary is renegotiating NAFTA to make it far better for corporations and worse for workers, and they're talking about this right out in the open... I mean, how much news have you seen about that?
Had I lived in Norman and those bands hadn't existed, who knows where I'd be, I might be doing something awful; I might be a doctor, or a physicist or something. Having those kinds of experiences at 12...the Chainsaw Kittens had a flamboyant homosexual lead singer, and the Flaming Lips were obviously very weird. I had only listened to the radio before that - things like Willie Nelson - so having people say, "These are the bands around here that you should listen to," I was like "Ok, I guess this is what normal music sounds like." That definitely changed things.
My introduction into making records was through a sampler, and that's what I did for a long time. And through doing that over a period of time and kind of coming out of it, I've realized that one of the reasons it works so well for me, one of the reasons psychologically I took to the process so well, was because I'm a problem-solver by nature. If you stick me in a void, I don't do so hot. As soon as there's one little thing to spark an idea, and then I have something to bounce off of - then I'm all right. But until I have that, like in that void, it's kind of hard.
A centerpiece for any kind of progressive social and economic program needs to be full employment with decent wages and working conditions. The reasons are starting with money. Does someone in your family have a job and, if so, how much does it pay? For the overwhelming majority of the world's population, how one answers these two questions determines, more than anything else, what one's living standard will be. But beyond just money, your job is also crucial for establishing your ability to raise a family, and your chances to participate in the life of your community.
What I realized is that if we're going to be able to have a theory about what happens in, for example, nature there has to ultimately be some rule by which nature operates. But the issue is does that rule have to correspond to something like a mathematical equation, something that we have sort of created in our human mathematics? And what I realized is that now with our understanding of computation and computer programs and so on, there is actually a much bigger universe of possible rules to describe the natural world than just the mathematical equation kinds of things.
I have this problem where I get incredibly, miserably nervous every single show. This is part of why touring is so exhausting for me. I have not gotten to a place where it's like, "All right, here's another." It just doesn't feel workaday, at all, yet. It's kind of killing me, being so nervous so many hours of the day. After the show - we try to end on an anthemic note, and I try and let that be decisive, and I will often come back out for an encore a cappella, and that's where I try and take leave from the feelings of the stage. Trying, after I do that, to return to my life.
The space station mission was kind of the culmination of all of my experience of being a NASA Astronaut, so it had brought all of my previous experience into play. I had to learn the Russian language to a fluent level so that I could function as the co-pilot of the Soyuz Spacecraft that we flew up and back from the space station. And then the challenge of being the Commander of the whole expedition, a six and a-half month flight aboard the international space station. I felt the burden of the whole mission on my shoulders, which was fine, and fortunately everything did go well.
Historically, measures initially directed at foreign nationals have subsequently been extended to citizens. What happens is foreign nationals are the easiest targets and most vulnerable targets, so they're the initial targets. But government officials, once you give them a certain kind of power over individuals, they get used to it and almost inevitably seek out ways to extend it. You will see that virtually every form of repressive government measure that has been employed in the United States against citizens started out as an antialien measure and was then extended to citizens.
Punk rock was the first thing I found in my life that made me feel acceptable. The thing that got me into punk rock was the idea, "You're fine just the way you are." It sounds kind of dorky, but you don't have to make excuses for who you are or what you do. When you find something like punk rock, not only is it okay to feel that way - you should embrace your weirdness. The world is totally messed up, and punk rock was a way to see that and work with it without candy-coating it. It was saying, "Yeah, the world is this way, but you can still do something about it. Take energy from that."
