Tennis is the purest form of democracy. There was a symbiotic, chicken-and-egg relationship for me between democracy and tennis.
I think I've got to go back to 'Someone to Watch Over Me.' I think it's a perfectly written song. I really do. I think it's one of the great songs in the American Songbook, and it speaks to love in its simplest and purest form.
All gut strings. That's just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, it's the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.
I often find myself feeling that filming music is somehow the purest form of filmmaking. This crazed collision of sound and images, the intense collaboration, these incredibly cinematic performances. And for the nights you're filming, a non-player like me gets to feel somehow part of the band.
Science fiction, in its purest form, for me, it works the best when it's being used as metaphor to look at something from a one-step-removed process, to give a little objectivity and insight into something that, if you were applying it on the face of it, we'd all be too close to.
Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality.
I think God's wrath and purgatory are the only things keeping me on the straight and narrow. I like the idea of purgatory. It's like a cosmic do-over.
I needed to purge myself of all the attention my parents had given me - I wasn't neglected enough as a child.
Sometimes I felt as a writer I was purging, and it almost hurt to purge to that level. Now it doesn't feel that way, maybe because I'm older. Maybe life has given me some punches, but it didn't knock me down.
If certain books are to be termed 'immigrant fiction,' what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me.
I wish to Christ I could make up a really great lie. Sometimes, after an interview, I say to myself, 'Man, you were so honest - can't you have some fun? Can't you do some really down and dirty lying?' But the puritan in me thinks that if I tell a lie, I'll be punished.
In the end, there's something of the puritan work ethic about me that roles really must sustain me on an intellectual level.
Good old-fashioned, puritanical work guilt is, for me, a better colleague than any Muse. If I reach my weekly word target by Friday afternoon, then the weekend is guilt-free.
I'm cursed with this puritanical streak that makes me want everything to be about something. It's a terrible affliction.
Political correctness means nothing to me. Nothing. It's the new Puritanism, darling. Preventing us from expressing ourselves.
For some reason, no one wanted to give me money to make a movie written in early modern English that involved a lot of puritans praying - even if it did involve a witch.
The Arab world is mediatised in a way that gives too much space to these people - puritans, extremists, whatever you want to call them. There are a lot more people like me in the Middle East than you might think.
New York gave me hell for that 'Purple Swag,' man. They didn't respect me until 'Peso.'
I was very against pink and purple when I was young, because they were girls' colors. But that was only because I didn't want people to write me off for what I can do. When I got into my 20s, I decided that was stupid.
I am purposeful in how I present myself to the world. I want my ideas to be taken seriously, and so I present myself in a way that allows people to see me and listen to what I have to say.
