I enjoy trying to figure out the best way to compliment the picture and not overpower it.
I think [kids] enjoy reading, but it's a different world now. There are a lot of competitors for the imaginative attention.
Maybe with "Californication" the character was partly based on Rick Moody. I read him and Jay McInerney, the templates for this bad boy novelist.
I also watch a lot of really bad television when I'm writing, "Like Dancing With the Stars," with my daughter.
Actually, I have an interest in finishing my Ph.D., but I just know I never will.
I'm a big Philip Roth fan. I think "American Pastoral" is the great American novel of the past 30 to 40 years. It's a novel about what happened in the 1960s, and I think America is still dealing with what happened then. It's devastatingly sad.
As I've gotten older I've become a devotee of 19th-century authors, such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot.
I'm always trying to perfect the romantic comedy, though.
At one time there were voiceover artists, now there are celebrity voiceover artists. It's unfortunate because these people need the money less than the voiceover artist.
I really like gratuitous nudity. I hate when people go, 'I'll only do it if it makes sense for the movie'. It never makes sense. So I like it - the more gratuitous the better.
A lot of times passion projects or films are difficult to make because they don't have proven directors attached to them.
If I were gay, you know. I think Woody Allen is one of a long list of men I might go gay for.
In the U.S., oddly, we have images of men as arrogant and aggressive.
Maybe the best things about celebrity are the things like being able to get that seat on the plane that you wouldn't normally get, but that's kind of like cheating.
If you're smart, you'll always be humble. You can learn all you want, but there'll always be somebody who's never read a book who'll know twice what you know.
Everybody gets the tattoo they deserve.
It's not someone else's responsibility to honor my marriage. It's my responsibility.
I don't need my phone to play me music. I need it to be a phone and an e-mail thing.
I don't make decisions based on money.
I don't like watching people work if they're making art.
Larry Grobel's interviews are informative and insightful without being pandering or intrusive. You get the sense at all times of both intelligence at work-the interviewee's and Grobel's-both inspired by the encounter.
Humility is considered an un-masculine quality.
Linda Brewer's example is inspiring, colorful and potentially very funny. Her journey also exists firmly in the Heartland tradition of American success stories and comedies.
Privacy is something I have come to respect. I think when I was younger I wanted to tell everybody everything, because I thought I was so damn interesting. Then I heard the snoring.
Whenever somebody says they need an angle for their story I always fear that they've got an idea and they want me to fit into it or they want me to come up with an idea myself or I'm supposed to be more revealing than I've been, and to me it just sounds like something I don't want to do.
