I think it was at 16 when I forced myself because my dad had nagged me for an entire year. Like, 'Come on, sing for people. You have a nice voice,' and I just wouldn't do it. One evening, I just decided, 'Screw it, I'll do it.' I remember it was really bad. But I did it. So that was good.

When I run on the treadmill, I read. But I have found that the only way to read while on the treadmill is to hold the book, since it moves around too much on the stand, you move around too much. I've gotten very good at holding a book and running, which tends to screw up my neck a little bit.

You first and foremost need to be honest with the script because you don't want to do anything to screw up the basic fundamentals of the story. You don't want to create anything overly dramatic when you don't need to, and you don't want to create anything less dramatic than necessary, either.

This is what I believe about performing: There is no reason to be on stage - there is no reason to be there - if you're not going to put all your baggage somewhere else and just be honest. Whatever you're doing - screw it up, do great - just be there, and be honest. That's the most important thing.

I was gonna throw the first pitch at a Mets game, but there was a rain delay. So I'm waiting for it to stop, and the team's manager, Willie Randolph, comes by. Now he's already intimidating to begin with. But he comes over to me and says, 'If you screw this up, they will boo you.' And I said 'Thanks.'

When my parents were divorced in the late '70s, early '80s, the climate was that you should screw over your ex as much as possible - get the worst lawyer in the world, all that. That's not what people are out to do anymore. It feels cruddy to try and destroy each other just because you're breaking up.

Walking in stop-motion animation is probably the most difficult thing you can do... The way that they have these puppets connect to the set is they actually drill a hole in the set, and they put a threaded rod up through that hole and screw it into the bottom of their foot, and that keeps them in place.

When you work with web design companies in San Francisco, you end up with a bunch of twenty-somethings who have their own cultural peculiarities, including obscurity for its own sake. You give those guys a website for a banking institution and they screw it up, because they are designing for themselves.

If I'm throwing a no-hitter and someone says, 'Hey, you've got a no-hitter,' obviously I'd be like, 'Yeah, I know.' I just try to be humble. I don't like to talk about myself. I have no problem speaking up when I screw up, but if I'm doing good, people are going to notice. I don't need to talk about it.

The decline of practical skills, some of them very day-to-day, among a generation of British men is very worrying. They can't put up a shelf, wire a plug, countersink a screw, iron a shirt. They believe it's endearing and cute to be useless, whereas I think it's boring, and everyone's getting sick of it.

Doing a me-too business, because it's you - the only person who cares about that is you. The market doesn't care if it's you. The market is pretty much being served. You better have something that the world doesn't have, because even then, you might screw it up through your own ineptitude and inexperience.

The more confidence you get as far as games under your belt, time spent with the guys, time in an offense, dealing with all the bull crap that you deal with in this profession. At some point you're kind of like, 'Screw it. I'm going to be me and do everything I can to win and if they don't like it, then oh well.

Being under the microscope meant I was never given any slack. I still managed to screw up plenty in life, mind you, but in the things I really cared about - the legal work, or the stories I was telling as a writer, or the office I built in government - I wasn't left a lot of margin for error. It's kept me driven.

At first blush, it seems odd that loser lit books are rejected initially, then go on to be fiercely loved by legions of readers. This apparent contradiction might be due to the fact that if they didn't screw up their lives, most losers would be the kind of power-elite, Type A go-getters whom readers love to hate.

The thing to me about this sport, all the fans, everyone that watches, everyone that has a career has had a bad day at work. If you have a project, you have a quota that you have to meet, you can screw up at it. At the end of the day, you get to go home to your family; you can bring your work home with you or not.

Parents don't care about their children; they're emotional, egotistical, selfish, and screw up their kids! Pastors knowingly mislead their flock by telling them that they can continue to sin and yet know God - because they themselves still sin. And we all know that the government does not care at all for the people.

On film, when you're driving home from the set, you realize what you should have done, but it's too late. When you're taking the subway home from your play, you realize what you did wrong, and you go back the next night and you do it better, or you screw it up again in a different way. It's a different thing altogether.

When David Fincher called me up a few years ago and said, 'Hey, I'd like you to score this film 'The Social Network,' I said, 'I'm flattered, but I really don't have any real experience scoring films, and I'd rather not screw it up on a high-profile project. And I like you and I don't want to compromise our friendship.'

Suzanne Collins, it was such a big thing for me to make the handshake with her and to say, 'You can trust me. I will not screw up your books. And I won't let them be diluted and softened. And I won't let them be exploited and made guilty of the sins that are being commented on in the books.' I take that really seriously.

I'm one of those people who can't watch themselves do anything. I could never watch myself wrestle. I've probably watched a handful of my matches. I never could watch myself. Even when I played college basketball, I hated film days... 'Oh God, I'm gonna watch myself screw up.' I'm just one of those people who can't watch their work.

I've always believed that government tends to screw up whatever it touches, but Obama in particular seemed different. He understood tech issues that left the other candidates bewildered. Part of it may be his age. But whatever the reason, I had real hope that he could help lead us into a new century of technology leadership and growth.

When I was a kid in the business, you always had in the back of your head this feeling that if I screw up, I might be fired. So you went out every night and tore your rear end up to make sure that you gave the best performance you can and learning constantly because you never had that idea of 'I'm so great, I'm never going to be fired.'

There ain't no genius here. Strategy in baseball is overrated. People say, 'That Weaver, he plays for the long ball too much.' You bet I do. Hit 'em out. Then I got no worry about somebody lousing up a bunt, I got no worry about the hit and run - and that's really overrated - I got no worry about base-running errors. And I can't screw it up myself.

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