If you want to change who you are, you have to change what you do.
Success, and even life itself, wouldn’t be worth anything if I didn’t have my wife and children by my side. They mean everything to me.
We all have times when we go home at night and pull out our hair and feel misunderstood and lonely and like we’re falling. I think the brain is such that there is always going to be something missing.
My goal was always to be recognized as a good actor but no one was interested in that, simply because society just wants to warm towards your appearance. This is the great blemish of society.
Face it, I didn’t become famous until I took my clothes off.
I’ve never been a fan of just doing. I like to do things for a reason.
I suppose that some days I wake up I have to wake up and be responsible, reliable and down to earth, and some days I don’t.
I’m kind of ashamed to be a celebrity. I don’t understand wanting to read about other people’s dirty laundry. I think celebrity is the biggest red herring society has ever pulled on itself.
I suppose I’m intrigued with the bad traits of society, because I’m a part of society, and the bad traits pose the dangerous questions for our future.
I’m only wanted by directors for the image I give off, and it makes me angry. I always wanted to be an actor and not a beauty pageant winner.
It used to be that I was always paranoid or a loser or something so there’s usually something that you seem to associate yourself with at one time or another.
Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real.
People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It’s not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.
If you don’t mind haunting the margins, I think there is more freedom there.
I do notice that when I’ve been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments.
I would rather five people knew my work and thought it was good work than five million knew me and were indifferent.
I want to say, strenuously, that although I have never considered the Darcy thing to be a problem, that is simply not going to happen.
I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I’m still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird.
The last thing I would attempt to do is to buy clothes for a child I didn’t know well.
I have a kind of neutrality, physically, which has helped me. I have a face that can be made to look a lot better – or a lot worse.
What’s fascinating is that when you write a script, it’s almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you’re not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.
We lived in a flat that you could pretty much fit in my current kitchen. No wonder people drink! I can’t understand why they don’t throw themselves off the balconies.
I’m still a member of the Empire! Although I sometimes feel like an American with a British accent – you get contaminated after so long.
I’m not the best audience for that because I’m not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that.
There will always be spies. We have to have them. Without them we wouldn’t have got Osama bin Laden – it took us years, but it happened.
I applaud anything that can take a kid away from a PlayStation or a Gameboy – that is a miracle in itself.
Speaking very generally, I find that women are spiritually, emotionally, and often physically stronger than men.
The film follows very much in the tradition of social realism, because I wanted to see a subject like this tackled with honesty.
I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles’ faces on it. It would be a collector’s item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine.
Rather like Batman, I embody the themes of the movie which are the values of family, courage and compassion and a sense of right and wrong, good and bad and justice.
I enjoy doing everything, comedy and drama. I just look for the characters really and what they offer.
I wanted to be an actor ever since I got on stage for the first time, aged 13. Before that, I thought I might follow in the medical footsteps of my parents: my father was a doctor, my mother a pharmacist.
David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He’s incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing.
I became an actor by doing school plays and youth theaters, and then National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. And then I did study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. For me that was a good way to enter the field, to work in the theater.
Depending on what your interest in theater is, I always recommend working on plays. It’s a great way to be introduced to the field, and also a great way to be seen by agents and representation. I’m also a great advocate for studying acting at a drama school or a college.
When I first had my eyebrows waxed, I was pretty disturbed.
It’s a strange thing, but you get this click in your brain; the wonderful feeling that the entirety of a character is suddenly available and accessible to you.
I think I enjoy working obviously as a lead, but also you know I feel I’m also a character actor as well, so I enjoy approaching various projects in all sort of capacities. Any film I have been able to do I feel very fortunate to have been a part of.
Solomon Northup is one of the most remarkable people Ive ever encountered in my life; one of the most amazing stories I have ever been in any kind of contact with. To not tell that story would have been disgraceful, in my opinion.
In England, theres no acknowledgement the invention of slavery came from Britain.
Creative director’ is a catchall phrase for giving ideas. To me, it obviously means more than that. It’s like being a counselor.
Collaboration is not a punchline… I only collaborate with the best in each category.
As a young designer in tune with culture, I’m interested in the lifeline of trends.
When creativity melds together with global issues, I believe you can bring the world together.
I pride myself in collaborating and being a creative director, and creative direction isn’t putting my opinion first. It’s supporting an artist so they get the most out of the project.
Big teams are absolutely vital if you want to achieve certain results when you’re working on larger scales, both in terms of physical size and productive quantities.
The whole point of collaboration is that you give and take from each other, and that’s how you create things that are totally new.
All I do all day is think of ideas and implement them. That’s an industry, you know. I’m trying to make art on a commercial scale.
From my perspective, I’m trying to stand for a generation. You know, each generation has designers who go along with it.
A lot of my sketches came from thoughts, and I always just wanted to act them out.
I hope people come to the shows because they feel like there’s something there that I can’t necessarily articulate, but it’s real and it’s fun.
hope a kid listens to my stuff, I hope there’s a change made and at least somebody walks away with: “I’m doing this because I like it.” People are going to hate it and that’s okay, but I have to do it because my happiness is important too, it’s worth it.
People are sometimes like: “Oh man, you’re so talented and you do a bunch of stuff.” I’m not! I swear to god, I’m not. I just like learning stuff, I like doing stuff. And I feel like everybody can definitely do it.
I hope in general that my music allows somebody to follow what they really like doing.
I feel like there’s a lot of rappers that could out-rap me and I wouldn’t want to face any of them.
Rapper, just puts so much connotation on who you are and what is exposed. Even if a lot of it is out-dated, people still bring a lot to it.
I don’t think I’m good, I don’t think I’m a good rapper. I think a lot of people always want me to battle somebody and stuff like that which is cool, but I don’t see myself as a rapper.
I would never challenge any rapper to a rap-off. It’s weird, I’m not that type of rapper.
I think that’s what makes a good rapper. Somebody who wants to push themselves and their audience further.
Failure is not the opposite of success; it’s part of success.
We think mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of the time we put in at work, instead of the quality of the time we put in.
Success is commonly defined as money and power, but increasingly that’s not enough. It’s almost like a two-legged stool where you fall over if that’s all you measure your life by.
Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It’s the mastery of fear. It’s about getting up one more time than we fall down.
We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions sometimes and that we’ll screw up royally sometimes.
Increasingly, staying in the middle class – let alone aspiring to become middle class – is becoming a game of choice.
Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me.
The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become fearless is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly – indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.
Disconnecting from our technology to reconnect with ourselves is absolutely essential for wisdom.
Coincidences connect us across time, to one another, to ourselves and to an invisible order in the universe.
Don’t worry about being successful but work toward being significant and the success will naturally follow.
Surround yourself only with people who are going to take you higher.
Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.
We can’t become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
As you become more clear about who you really are, you’ll be better able to decide what is best for you – the first time around.
The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.
Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never have enough.
The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change their future by merely changing their attitude.
I don’t think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who, from and early age, knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.
Use your life to serve the world, and you will find that is also serves you.
