Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I didn't want to do 'Casino Royale' when they told me to audition. I said no. Then they sent me the script, and I thought it was actually very interesting - and I had no other work at the time.
If an artist wants to work with me because they feel I've made some credible albums and there've been things that are long-lasting, it's because those artists took the time and we built an idea.
There are staples to my show. I have to be conscious about switching things up because I know people who saw me last year will say, 'He did that last time.' But if certain things work, they work.
One time, someone came up to me and said, 'I know so-and-so. They're a professor at Harvard. They're a big fan of your work.' But that doesn't impress me more than any other people feeling that way.
I agree I'd like to do more work. But the right kind of roles has to be offered to me. I'm not saying the roles need to be realistic all the time, though that's what I like connecting with on screen.
Winning is, of course, rewarding; who doesn't enjoy winning? But for me, it's about more than just winning: it's about knowing I'm putting in the day-to-day work to get a little bit better every time.
I've gone through long periods of time when there's no work for me. You wait for the next job to come along, and when it does, there's never a consideration about whether you do or don't do something.
I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.
When you balance it against New Order, New Order don't work or tour relentlessly. We definitely work in our own way and sometimes it's a bit too slow for me, so I like to plan ahead and fill my time up.
I went to work when I was a young fellow and I loved what I did. And I just kept working. And when I decided that maybe the time had come for me to quit, I got depressed. What could I do if I didn't work?
Think of how much time is spent looking and applying for jobs. Some of those who have read my book on the precariat have told me they have applied for thousands of jobs. This is scarcely leisure; it is work.
I left my native place to come to Mumbai, got routinely cheated, was given bad words, had phones and doors slammed on me. All my work and time was going down the drain. I didn't get credit for some work I did.
I want to be careful when I'm breaking down matches because I don't want to offend anybody or knock anybody's work. It took me a long time to get where I was at, so I know how it feels when someone knocks on you.
I'll admit it: I'm a control freak. I am. If I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it 110% or there's no point in doing it at all, especially if the work takes me away from time with my husband and children.
I find it amusing that every time I was asked when I will work with Zoya or Farhan, I was quoted as saying, 'It will be easier to convince Steven Spielberg to cast me rather than my own children.' That has come true.
I still work on it almost every day in the gym. You have to know your body and that also means knowing when it's time to rest. Sometimes the coach will manage me and give me a day off so that I'm right for the weekend.
Every single second of extra time to work with other actors has definitely always, for me, paid off for the film. For the project. Every single extra heartbeat you could get, mutually considering the scene, was of benefit.
Every August, I go away for four weeks to a place in Michigan. I work in the mornings, spend the month in shorts and flip-flops. It gives me time to think like an investor and come back in September for some heavy planning.
I and Dil Raju guru have always wanted to work with each other. He had sent to me stories, 4-5 over the years, but somehow, something was not perfect with them. But when I listened to 'Nenu Local,' I felt the time had arrived.
I'm a victim of my own insides. There was a time when I wanted to know everything. It used to make me very unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn't know what to do with it. But now I've learned to make that feeling work for me.
Most of us work so hard and live so hard. On the first day of the holiday I remain in work gear, it can take me some time to slow down and all that time I'm missing the serendipity of the wonderful things that are all around us.
Something really intense happened to me during the 'SNL' performance. It felt like the person I was made to be faced the person I'm becoming. It was the first time I felt like I was able to make any sense of ownership of my work.
As a matter of fact, there was a period of time, especially in my first career, when that's the only one who would work out with me: my dogs. As you get better and better working out, there's no one who can keep up with you running.
Me and Clams have always kept it organic with the way we work. It's just always the right time. It's never no pressure. He always comes through if I need him. I always come through if he needs me, and we always meet at that right time.
The album 'Physicist,' I erased all the work that I had done halfway through. I think that's probably why that contributed to that album being sort of sub-par for me, just because by the time I had to go back and do it, I was just over it.
I used to really want to go on the stage and then the last couple of years I've done some presenting at some award shows. I was so nervous I thought I was going to be sick, so I don't think me on stage for any length of time would work too well.
Don't let anyone tell you your ideas are stupid or the thing you feel most passionate about 'won't work' - it's happened to me time and time again, and we find that if you push at what you think is interesting hard enough, you're probably right.
I don't work all the time. That's why I waited to have children until I was ready for that. I try to organise my time according to them because they need me. I don't want to put my work first anymore because it's not as important as my children.
I couldn't play ball. I couldn't dance. Luckily, the girls didn't want me. Not much I could do about that. So I started to draw and to write. By the time I got to where I was attracting girls, I was already into work, and it was more important to me.
There are many projects that come an actor's way, and one cannot say yes to all of them. Reasons of saying no vary all the time, but for me, it has never been on the pretext of not wanting to work with 'a particular actor' ever! I would never do that.
It was actually an Israeli cartoonist, Nurit Karlin, who made me think that I could draw for 'The New Yorker.' I saw her work published in the magazine in the early 1970s - she was the only woman working as a cartoonist at 'The New Yorker' at the time.
People come up to me on the street and make some little joke - like they'll say, 'Excuse me, sir, what time is it?' And I'll say, you know, '5:15,' and they'll say, 'Hey! Made you talk!' And that's merely a way of saying, 'I know your work and I like you.'
Actors spend most of their time out of work, so I actually spend more time making furniture. The thing about furniture that's much better than acting is that it's just me. There's no director, no script - the concept is me, unless a client wants something.
One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me.
They've kind of backed off and allowed me to do what I do. I think that's the biggest testament is that they know when to have a hand in things, and they know when to back off, let me work, and let me do my thing. During my time in NXT, they have definitely done that.
It was a dreamlike time for me from December 1997 to March of '98. Before that, I was basically unknown. Then, bang! The starting gun fired, and everybody just started running. It was learn-on-the-job. And there were more opportunities for work than I had time to do them.
Unbeknown to me, my manager, under my very nose (in a crouching position) has all these years been secretly compiling a book from my correspondence. I often wondered what she was doing in my office. She never did a stroke of work for me. All the time, I have been working for her.
For me, a lot of my work has dealt with what it means to be at the center of the universe and how alienating and kind of seductive it is. A lot of my work is very aggressive and very visual, but at the same time, it has a lot of tension in it and makes you kind of uncomfortable sometimes.
Me and my cousin, most of the time we worked on radios and fixed them. I guess we started because I was curious to understand how radios work. When I was little, I used to think there were small people inside. Most of the time, I was just trying to see the people who are speaking in the radio.
Acting is a craft to me: I just think you get better the more you do it. And then the irony to that is your doing it is not in your control. If it was up to most actors, we'd work all the time, and we'd always get better. But it's not in our control, so we have to wait to be given parts to do.
I was painfully shy for a long time. I mean, that's something I really had to work my way out of. And I really think it was because, after the 2008 Olympics, I spent a whole year bartending. It was the one thing that really forced me to be just not so scared to start conversations with strangers.
Time and again, a student will send me an urgent appeal to hear her, saying she is poor and wants my advice as to whether it is worthwhile to continue her studies. I invariably refuse such requests, saying that if the student could give up her work on my advice, she had better give it up without it.
I don't plan anything out, and I don't write in chronological order. The emotional tenor is what guides me, but a lot of it is feeling my way through the dark. That's okay if you have unlimited time to work and stumble upon things in a delightful way, but under a deadline, it can be really stressful.
Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write - eight months for 'Seesaw Girl,' eight months for 'Shard,' three years for 'When My Name Was Keoko!' The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether each book can take up to three or four years to publish.
The first thing I do when I come to work, I say hello to my dogs and give them one biscuit each. The butler takes them out to the park and drops them off at the office, so they are there waiting for me. They are very popular in the studio. They play all the time. They run around, up and down, left and right.
I've been through my fair share of highs and lows. Yes, I've been written off, and it amazes me, and it amuses me, also, when I'm written off by the press cause then I tell them that's just the lull before the storm. And every time I've been down, I've been down, never out. So it just makes me work a lot harder.
When I'm hard at work, when I'm deep in it, there is no other feeling. For me, my work is at all times building a nation out of thin air. It is manning the troops. It is painting a canvas. It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon. It is being Beyonce. And it is all of those things at the same time.
I kind of had a quarter-life crisis before I did 'Rent.' I had done Glinda in 'Wicked' for a while. I had worked for Cirque Du Soleil, and then I did 'Hair.' Then I had a real quiet time, not having work, and it was a time of not only self-discovery of me as a person, but also what I wanted as an artist and actor.
I went to the library and learned how checks work. I found out that routing numbers are like zip codes: the checks are sent to the bank that correlates to the routing number. If I manipulate those numbers to a bank far away, it would take longer to get back to the bank, which gave me more time to write more bad checks.
Occasionally, as an actor, you're not... Sometimes, at least for me, I'm not fully in the groove until the second or third take, in which I would not want to just stop. If it's a scene that takes a lot of work and time, sometimes the scene gets better with time, and sometimes it gets exhausted. I think it just depends on the scene.