Writers like to write, and writing in different forms - short, long, bite-sized, done on the fly, done with painstaking attention - all interest me.
A painstaking course in qualitative and quantitative analysis by John Wing gave me an appreciation of the need for, and beauty of, accurate measurement.
I was not a great bartender, but I did OK. I wasn't great at being efficient behind the bar, but I was pretty great at talking to people. I was a pretty good waiter. It was painstaking to get me to care about the clientele of some of these places I was working at.
I use the computer as a paintbrush. It enables me to do in hours what would have taken months.
People often tell me how much they love the digital skies that we obviously painted for 'War Horse.' Well, there's not a single sky that we put in through special effects. The skies you see in the movie are the skies that we experienced - but it was definitely challenging at times.
If I were a painter, you'd be calling me Shaqcasso.
Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.
Despite the fact the studio looks out of five windows onto a picture perfect view of sky, hills and wide open spaces, I work with my blinds firmly drawn, daylight filtered through their white canvas, a painterly northern light falling through two big skylights above my table, and nothing visible outside to distract me.
There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.
I started wearing Ugg when I was, like, 13 or 14, in high school, and my mom got me a pair for Christmas one year.
Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.
It's tough for me to get rid of clothes. I grew up in a household with a limited budget and we really had to make our nice clothes last, and so now I'll get free pairs of shoes and this, that and the other and I'll be like, 'Oh great!'; even though it stresses me out that I don't have enough room to put them, I can't throw them away.
One thing my dad always told me, was he would make sure I always had what he didn't have. He couldn't play basketball because he didn't have tennis shoes - so I had five pairs of tennis shoes.
I think people see me as someone very much associated with political agreement and, probably more than anything else, being able to build a relationship with loyalist leaders Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson.
Paisley offered me and my family a life, way back, and it has continued to do so.
People were always asking me who I wanted to tour with, and I always said Jason Aldean or Brad Paisley.
When I was a kid, I loved really loud things. My grandmother and I went to the Fulton Mall, and I bought a three-piece suit that was paisley. Paisley over the whole suit. I was 6 and thought it was great. My mother took a photo of me in it, sent it to my grandmother, and burned the suit.
I would wear pajamas to work every day if it were up to me.
When Pakistan beat England at cricket, my Pakistani cousins remind me how English and British I am. When they say, 'You're one of the Queen's advisers,' for them it's, 'Wow - anything's possible in the U.K.'
I never did pal around with actresses. Their talk usually bored me to tears.
