I’ve had offers to sign a record deal, but the people I’ve talked to have wanted to package me and have me meet with songwriters who’ve written stuff for Whitney Houston, that sort of thing....

I like the performing. And interviews, even. And the stuff that’s not sitting in a room by yourself with empty paper. But I never loved writing, to tell you the truth.

The technology is good and it’s bad. You know what you’re dealing with out there musically, but my head stops at this electronic stuff. I don’t quite know what I’m dealing with out there yet.

I’m not running for office. I just want people to come to my stuff and escape and see me as a character, not as anything else.

I’m obsessed with shopping. I’ll get these urges to buy, like to shop for stuff on the Internet. I search for all kinds of weird gizmos I could get.

Not many people read my stuff, but I really like the ones that do.

I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter. There are moments I feel like 99 percent of the people who write stuff are the sweetest people, and then one crazy guy or girl spoils the whole...

The pleasure of one’s effect on other people still exists in age – what’s called making a hit. But the hit is much rarer and made of different stuff.

I’m not good at watching stuff that I’m in at all. I should stop. I shouldn’t watch something for the first time with a room full of people at Sundance. It’s not a good idea.

I think probably the thing I’m worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I’m often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And...

I think I have just always had an awareness that when you go to a premiere and people start cheering and shouting your name and stuff, they are shouting at a perception of you that...

I am really fortunate to have parents who supported my plan to become an actress when I was a little kid. And then there was my grandma. She was the best. She was always there...

I try to be outraged by things that other people are just very accepting of, as though they’re normal and can’t be changed. A lot of what I write about is, ‘Hey, you know, this...

Harvard freshmen are smart, interested, and excited, and it’s fun hearing their different perspectives and stuff that they will share.

But there is something to the fact that we don’t see games on the West Coast, or we don’t see games on the East Coast, and stuff like that. It’s so unfair, because there is...

Every country I would go to, even if it was just on a modeling job, I would go to their markets. If I went to Morocco for ‘Elle’ magazine, I would be in the spice...

When I do appearances and stuff and I just wanna see the new pictures, I Google myself.

I’m almost tempted, when I’m playing a real person, not to meet them. Afterwards, maybe. But, the job is the same. You still have to show up on screen and be alive and real and...

The way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person’s soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack.

Stuff that would be weird in the bright light of day just wasn’t so much once you passed a certain hour.

The most influential thing was the two Chris Rock specials that came out when I was in high school. I was obsessed with that stuff.

I like doing both TV and live stuff, though it’s nice to mix it up.

My first job was with an auto plant, Kansas City – they treated you like slaves. From there I went back to Chicago, worked in steel mills, drove a cab, stuff like that.

If you take my stuff apart, you’ll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who’s probably my favourite writer.

I don’t like to be overexposed. Too many articles, too many tweets, too many posts, I just don’t like that. But at the same time, we live in a culture where that’s almost necessary. People...

Growing up, my sisters and I would always talk stories. One of my frustrations was I didn’t know anything about cameras. I didn’t know how to make a film and I obviously didn’t have a...

I think most writers feel like they’re on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

When you write an album and you’re writing about relationships, the stuff that I’ve been through in my relationships, 99 percent of it is really good, but it’s that one percent that always inspires you...

Are you familiar with 9/11? Building 7? You know what was in there? All the Enron stuff. I guess that building went down on its own.

I think the stuff that plays on the radio, the majority of it is for teenagers, which is okay. That’s what pop radio is about. And some of it is great, and some of it...

I go to a lot of stand-up comedy. I find more inspiration from observational stuff than from rap.

Without really analyzing it, I grew up in Massachusetts, so the Salem witch trials were always something that I was around. The average kindergartner probably doesn’t know about it, except that in Massachusetts, you do,...

Once people tell me I can’t do stuff, I’m going to go and make it happen.

Aesthetically, I don’t really like the blond, tan thing. I am pale. So I may as well embrace the pale. Long, blond hair and a bad spray tan is the stuff of my nightmares.

Don’t try to follow any trends, just concentrate on writing great songs and knowing your instrument. All the other stuff will fall into place.

A friend of mine told me a bunch of stuff on Buddhism and about Avicii being the lowest level of Buddhist hell, and it just sort of got stuck in my head. Later on when...

I was always tearing stuff apart to see how it worked.

Regardless of what you want to call it, guys need some type of spirituality they can grab onto. If it’s Christianity, which is a very structured approach, or if it’s something that’s a little more...

I wore the Marc Jacobs dress, so I love Marc Jacobs. He has a vintage flair. But I’ve always worn a lot of vintage stuff, so it hasn’t been a lot of designers. If I...

I would like to involve myself in some black music. I would like to do some blues and some gospel music. I want to try stuff from other genres and try to widen my musical...

I have a friend in New York who’s a stylist and I went over to her place because she’s got a lot of clothes. I basically ended up wearing most of it. So it’s all...

My dad has more sparkly stuff than most men.

I would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn’t changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for...

I didn’t know anything about movies or movie stars or the Academy or anything. I was just a blank sheet of paper. I was totally ignorant of all that stuff. I never went to the...

The universe is all time stuff.

Repetitiveness is one of the things that’s most difficult to get away from in genre pictures, because people come specifically to see certain kinds of things but get disappointed if they’re presented in the same...

My first film was a comedy, but after that I went always into more heavier stuff.

I do a lot of CG stuff for fun.

I would have to work on the song and figure out how they wanted the song done, because they’re such high-intensity songs. We figure that out first, then I go back and listen to it...

I bought a lot of rubbish things that kids buy: skateboards and clothes and typical teenage stuff. And, as soon as I could, I wasted a lot of money on cars – BMW’s mostly –...