When I was I kid, there were so many different things that I wanted to be. As an actor, I get a chance to be all of those things, at least for a couple of days, which is fun.
You can change the feel of your sofa by adding a thick, cozy throw and playing a couple of classic pillows off a more Moroccan-inspired one.
[Cardinal John O'Connor] had [my wife] Margot and me over for drinks a couple of times. That was something I never could have envisioned back when I was a kid in Boston, that a cardinal and I would be, if not breaking bread, at least breaking Scotch.
I found out - the paper used to go to bed on Tues - on Monday. I found out that on Monday nights, the editors would cut out - literally cut out passages, sometimes whole paragraphs, of some of the writers that might possibly offend blacks, lesbians, gays, radicals. And I wrote a couple of columns about that. And they're - of course, they were annoyed that I had written about it, but, I mean, it - another example - and [my wife Margot] always also conjured that.
Carl Armstrong was one of those people in the anti-war years who had been so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that he and some friends decided they would blow up a building at the University of Wisconsin, in which they said research was being done to help the war against the Vietnamese. What they blew up at three or four in the morning was a young scientist, who was married and had a couple of kids, who wasn't working on war stuff at all. And he was killed.
We had met with Ben Stiller here in LA when I was shooting The Ring and he was doing Meet The Fockers and we have friends in common. But we didn't know each other well. He's fantastic and we really had a great time on this and we were both laughing at where we were at, this other couple, and how it was mirroring what we were going through as well. It was clever writing in that way.
It's very hard to be a screenwriter. I remember getting a couple of awards. I got a PEN West award a million years ago when I did Running on Empty, and I sat in the room with all these writers. They wrote everything from novels to non-fiction to children's books to journalism - any kind of writing - and I realized that there was no one in the room who would ever read anything I'd written.
Everyone has their own experiences with song. It means one thing to me and it means something entirely different to somebody else. I have a song called 'Apple Cherry' which is a song about unrequited love and to this couple in London, they fell in love to this song. The girl in the relationship called me and said she wanted to propose to her girlfriend could you sing 'Apple Cherry' while I do it? I was like 'Really? That's not a love song about getting together'.
In a couple of days, it will be 40 days, 40 hours, 40 years in the desert - 40 is fraught with meaning and symbolism.
I was 47 when I got pregnant. I'd been trying for a couple of years and thought it would never happen.
Such debates [about the nature of Scripture], in my view, distract attention from the real point of what the Bible is there for. Squabbling over particular definitions of the qualities of the Bible is like a married couple squabbling over which of them loves the children more, when they should be getting on with bringing them up and setting them a good example. The Bible is there to enable God's people to be equipped to do God's work in God's world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God's truth.
Microsoft has built loyalty at the end-user level, including upper management, .. That works for a while in the early stages of a product, but after a couple of years the blush fades from the rose. It's reality versus marketing.
When you get a mobile phone it is almost like having a card to get you out of poverty in a couple of years.
I was asked in a way when Honorable Elijah Mohammed said take the step, choose between the wealth of America and the millions of dollars and the title, the ministry. So, I chose the ministry. If I was not sincere, then I would have easily went to Vietnam, boxin' exhibitions, and made a couple of cool million.
I don't see no black and white couples in England or America walking around proud holding their children and going out.
I did some theatre. I had some smaller roles in a couple TV shows and films. I used to think I did a lot of acting, but my 'career' started when I started Homeland.
A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.
Because adoption meets the needs of children so successfully, and because there have long been waiting lists of couples hoping to adopt babies and children, it would seem that the solution for abused or neglected kids was obvious. But not to the do-gooders. To remove a child from an abusive parent, sever the parent's parental rights, and permit the child to be adopted by a couple who would give the child a loving home began to seem too 'judgmental.'
At the MTV Movie Awards, I was wearing a dress, and that red carpet is outside, and Victoria Justice was going before me on the red carpet. Apparently she's like the biggest star in the world, so everybody was just like 'Victoria! Victoria!' so I am just standing there, and a couple of reporters were just like 'Hello.' And then my skirt just flies up, and I was like 'Take that, Victoria Justice!'
In real life, my son had a little injury a couple of years ago where we had moved into a new house and he put his hand through a glass window and it cut him really badly. Thank god he had surgery and repaired everything, but I remember I felt frozen I was so scared, and then I realized I was holding my hand just because his hand was hurt.
I think that things were getting really very bad a couple of years ago, and there's been a very significant change in response to that on the part of the security forces and the government, but particularly the army. And you see Pakistan actually fighting terrorism and terrorists in a much more wholehearted way than had been occurring previously. It's not anywhere close to over yet, but you've seen a big change in the antiterrorism campaign here.
I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.
As a child, I used to feel much more American than Iranian. Like everyone else at school, I pledged allegiance to the flag. However, after returning to Iran, sadly, I learned about a very different America, an America that most Americans have no idea exists. For the first couple of years this was hard to accept, and it was really painful in some ways.
You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.
There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.
