It can get really messy inside my head, and it's usually just because everybody can get really self-centered at some point. And so what usually keeps me from quitting is that my reasons for quitting are just lame. I wouldn't want anybody else to talk to myself the way that I talk to myself.
I'm from a rural town outside of Stockholm, so in coming to L.A., I've been able to not think that much about my background. It's much easier for me in this big town, this big bubble to isolate myself from that and be a little more self-confident. I'm here to do my take on soul.
If I had been more self-conscious about being a woman, it would have stifled me.
Hollywood wouldn't suit me. In L.A. it's all about work - studio people have their five minutes with you and they go, 'Oh mah Gahd, I love your movie.' You just feel very self-conscious there.
People look at me and go, 'He's only successful because he's got a bunch of 16-year-old girls at his back who don't understand comedy.' Well, they do. In any case, no one hates me more than I do; no one's more self-conscious about that than I am.
I would say I'm self-taught, but Corinne Day made me less conscious of myself. I was 15, and she'd make me take off my top, and I'd cry. After five years, you get used to it, and you're not self-conscious anymore.
Listening to Alabama Shakes made me less self-conscious about my voice.
For me, working out is nothing to do with looks. It's to let it all out - the stress, the self-consciousness - you think less; it makes you more centred.
I have learned that I really do have discipline, self-control, and patience. But they were given to me as a seed, and it's up to me to choose to develop them.
I must learn to love the fool in me - the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries.
Every time we watch a little story play out inside our head, we're fantasizing, whether we realize it or not, and it seems to me that, though succumbing to fantasies about other people can be dangerous or self-defeating, the act of fantasizing itself is also an essential part of being human, of being capable of both abstraction and empathy.
Humour has always been a self-defence mechanism for me.
My dad sent me a clipping about the self-defence militias in Mexico. Immediately, when I read it, I knew I wanted to create a parallel story about vigilantes on both sides of the border.
I suppose I have a highly developed capacity for self-delusion, so it's no problem for me to believe that I'm somebody else!
Some of my friends and family have tried to challenge me to do jokes that aren't as self-deprecating, where I genuinely express my own opinion in my own voice.
It's bloody annoying being shy. I'll spend a whole evening at a party asking everyone else about themselves. I'm not being self-deprecating; it's because I'm too shy to talk about myself. So people come away from the evening actually having learnt nothing about me.
Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction, and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness.
The Iraqis are not threatened by the Turks or by the Iranians or by the Saudis and they tell me that these are not weapons of mass destruction, they are weapons of self-destruction.
As soon as you tell me to do one thing, I do the opposite. As soon as someone tells me not to get any more tattoos, I have this intense fire burning inside me to cover myself with them. I don't care if it's self-destructive. I just have that need to rebel.
Feminists who say that I switched sides because I am an opportunist should know that exactly the opposite is true. It's cost me a lot of money. I've gone from being well-to-do to being $70,000 in debt. I have done something self-destructive financially. I could only do it because I don't have to support a wife and child.
