I think by now if people hire me, they know I'm going to improvise. I'm an improviser by trade.
You have to know composition to be a good improviser.
The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.
Robert Altman was a very jovial guy and obviously a famed improviser and perhaps less effective in post-production, which is like the crystallising process. So I found myself at sea often with him because we'd have conversations about what music is, and in the end, I don't know how interested he was?
The trouble with the jokes is that once they're written, I know how they're supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I'm more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work.
All improv turns into anger. All comedy improv basically turns into anger, because that's all people know how to do when they're improvising. If you notice shows that are improvising are generally people yelling at each other.
When history looks back, I want people to know that the Nazis could not kill millions of people with impunity.
If members of the security apparatus could, with impunity, keep from those elected by the people that which they're entitled to know - or worse, feed false information - those who could control the classified data could be the real decision makers.
I know that President-elect Trump has a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. We've had in-depth conversations about God.
Titan has no liquid water on its surface, and any liquid water beneath its surface is inaccessible to us, as far as we know. It has hydrocarbon lakes, but we don't know of any organisms that could live in those, not at the temperatures that we find on Titan. Any reference to possible life in lakes on the surface of Titan is pure speculation.
Periods of inactivity, I don't know such things. I'm consistently writing. My life is busy. It always is. There are hardly any moments for self-indulgent laziness.
You have to discover when you're inadequate to be funny and you don't know you're inadequate when you're a kid.
Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.
I know that as a vegan, I'm in a minority. People love their meat. It's up there with sugar and TV and maybe even coffee on the list of inalienable American rights.
Every once in a while I get the highly inappropriate proposal which is like, 'Wow, Really! You don't even know me and I don't know you at all, and you want that to happen? Tonight? Ok, I get off work at 7.30.'
As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.
It's very hard for me to know what to say about fusion right now, inasmuch as it is not yet scientifically feasible. I just can't understand how so many people are able to predict so much about something that still isn't scientifically possible.
When Obama was inaugurated, he and his team had an insight - though whether the insight was conscious or not I don't know. But it was this: The TARP $700 billion price tag was a new kind of model.
Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.
I've often said in the past that I thought MTV was sort of evil incarnate and signified the beginning of the end. And I don't know if I'm entirely wrong about that, but they did sign my paychecks a year ago, so I guess I'm part of the problem.
