If I look smart and feel confident, other people's bigoted assumptions have less power to harm me.
We look for opportunities to play together including basketball, tennis, swimming, riding bikes and touch football. I try to provide a loving environment where we can play. I think that's good on so many levels - emotionally, for family interactions and, of course, physically.
I've always been kind of uncomfortable just on the beach in a swimsuit. I'm never my most confident in a bikini on the beach, especially when you know people are looking at you, and they expect one thing because of what they see in the magazines, and you might not look that way. It's always been a scary thing for me.
I started thinking: 'Okay, what's wrong with wearing a bikini? I look better than I looked in quite a few years, so why not? What am I afraid of?
One of my major goals off the field is to conduct myself in a way that... parents are proud to say, 'Oh yeah, look, he wants to be like Sonny Bill Williams.'
When you look at the artists who have come up through 'Billboard' over the years, it's incredible.
According to one critic, my works looked like scraped billboards. I went to look at the billboards and decided that more billboards should be scraped.
I have the ability to sing with emotion and feeling, but if you say I sound like Billie Holiday, that's cool. Let's look at who Billie was: she was this person, this singer, this beautiful diva who could move the audience with the slightest gesture of her hand.
You need to look no further than Apple's iPhone to see how fast brilliantly written software presented on a beautifully designed device with a spectacular user interface will throw all the accepted notions about pricing, billing platforms and brand loyalty right out the window.
Planet Earth is estimated to have a lifetime of nine billion years. And we're right smack in the middle of our lifetime. We've been in the universe for 4.5 billion years. So, that should mean something. We should sort of take a look at where we came from and where we are going.
I am upset and completely disappointed in the government, the millionaires and billionaires in the U.S. See what's happening to the country? Look at all the health problems, the economy, the recession and crime.
One of the things we have to acknowledge is that if you look at Haiti, many billions of dollars have gone into development aid there that have not been effective.
In our business, things look like a failure until they're not. It's pretty binary transitions.
There are a lot of actors who try to get records made and try to make record deals, and everybody goes, 'Ugh.' It used to be expected in the entertainment business. I mean look at Sinatra, Bing Crosby. All these guys started out as singers.
Most people, including many Jews, think of Yom Kippur as a 25-hour caffeine headache capped off by a lox-and-bagels binge. It's undeniably that. But it is also, at its deepest level, a dry run. It is the one day of the year when we Jews are asked to look our mortality in the face.
I was transformed by picking up a pair of binoculars and looking up, and that's hard to do for a city kid because when you look up you just see buildings - and really, your first thought is to look in people's windows. So to look out of the space - out of living space - and look up to the sky, binoculars go far, literally and figuratively.
Too often we just look at these glistening successes. Behind them in many, many cases is failure along the way, and that doesn't get put into the Wikipedia story or the bio. Yet those failures teach you every bit as much as the successes.
I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing.
When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success.
Where there's water on Earth, you find life as we know it. So if you find water somewhere else, it becomes a remarkable draw to look closer to see if life of any kind is there, even if it's bacterial, which would be extraordinary for the field of biology.
