I can see the character in a photograph, in the way a guy stands or holds his hands, the way he buckles his belt. I fantasize a lot looking at photographs. I'm sure that doesn't work for many people.
I'd bought a lot of really challenging, cutting-edge Joel-Peter Witkin photographs very early on. There were severed heads and amputated feet and hands in them - gruesome stuff. I had them all around the house, and if someone couldn't relate to it in some artistic way and instead just said "Yuck," then there probably wouldn't have been anywhere for us to go.
I have to admit, a manicured look works for me.
Billions of people don't practice a religion at all.
If people lose their land, they have nothing. You lose your land - you lose your culture, you lose self.
People are always talking about freedom. Freedom to live a certain way, without being kicked around. Course the more you live a certain way, the less it feel like freedom. Me, uhm, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time.
One of the joys of being an actor is that you're always learning new things. And I've been doing this since I was 19, so there's been a lot of new things I have learned for each part. I always assume that I can do it.
It's rare that a good writer will sit down and write a good script. Writers are greedy too, and they don't want to work without getting paid. But quality will find its way out.
Certainly there have been better actors than me who have had no careers. Why? I don't know.
If the United States marches into Iraq without the backing of the United Nations, that will be done entirely without the backing of the American people.
In the process of developing a character, you do, in fact, start to take him on as a personality. It's part of my job.
When I am in Tibet, I am very happy. The Tibetans radiate. They literally send out light. The Dalai Lama's holiness generates love and compassion to every human being. He has committed himself to that. I haven't made that leap yet. I haven't given up self-aspiration. I still love making movies.
We've had too many World AIDS Days.
I tend to be a bit of a dreamer.
On a movie set that works, you have your father figure, the director, you have your siblings, your other actors.
His Holiness [the Dalai Lama] has told me, urgently and repeatedly, that he thinks my photographs are crap. His exact words were, 'These photos are of poor quality. Why is there no sharp focus? There is no clarity!' I said, 'But your Holiness, it's Goyaesque.' And he said, 'No! It's out of focus!'
I've always maintained that all characters and all personalities are in all of us. The whole thing is available. You're not this or that, no one is.
In a way, one gets stability from being able to order the rational mind.
I do my work as an actor, but another part of my work goes to the piece as a whole. I can be fairly detached looking at my work and be brutal on myself.
Any political situation has many sides... We intellectualize the whole situation any way... We make our intellectual decisions based on our cultural background and how we live.
I had a friend in the neighborhood whose father had Playboy magazines, and we would go over and look at them. I remember cutting out pictures and hiding them in my room.
I think that as human beings we tend to compartmentalize, and we have a selective morality based on the situation we're in.
I think people do want to relate their entertainment to what's going on in their lives. Not everything.
I have a lot of beautiful friends.
It's not enough to say that the Olympics is an athletic contest outside of politics, because it's not. The Chinese clearly are using the Olympics to recreate how they are viewed in the world and how they view themselves.
