I am known to be able to take care of myself when I become angry. I don't mince words.
I've never really been aware of what is said about me, whether it's positive or negative. I ignore it. I've always had the mind-set: 'No one can challenge me better than myself.'
I do some compassionate mindfulness every day. It's like a Buddhist thing. I tell myself that I'm doing a good job, that kind of thing. It makes me feel better.
We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.
I have a very steadfast tendency to parent myself, to monitor my development into the person I want to be. I've tried to keep the corruption minimal.
As for minimalism, I don't care, don't care, don't care to repeat myself, repeat myself.
When I'm trusting and being myself as fully as possible, everything in my life reflects this by falling into place easily, often miraculously.
Farz' proved to be a flop for the first 10 weeks. I remember buying tickets worth Rs 5000 myself, just so the film would run in theatres longer. And in the 11th week the film miraculously picked up and ran for 50 weeks!
I have this phobia: I don't like mirrors. And I don't watch myself on television. If anything comes on, I make them shut it off, or I leave the room.
Having the right people around you all the time is important. I do take the acting seriously. But this is all fun. I look at it like smoke and mirrors. I still think it's a dream, but I ain't pinching myself yet.
I grew up as a Mormon, and that had more of an impact on my values than my beliefs. I'm afraid I will always feel the weight of a lie. I'm very hard on myself anyway. Religious guilt carries over too. You can't really misbehave without feeling badly about it. At least, I can't.
Genuinely my big thing and the reason I'm in 'The Miser' is because I always ask myself one simple question when I'm offered anything: Will it get me nearer to being 'Doctor Who' or further away?
I hate seeing myself misquoted.
I think it's important to take a break, you know, from the public eye for a while, and give people a chance to miss you. I want longevity. I don't want to get out there and run myself ragged and spread myself thin.
When I first discovered for myself the Celtic Twilight and read the earlier poems of Yeats and others, all was entirely incomprehensible to me. I groped through a mist of blurred meanings, stumbled through lines in which every accent seemed to be in the wrong place.
It's nice to have a few names. I use a few names myself. I use a few different surnames. I call myself James sometimes. I actually use my mother's name as a professional name. But if someone calls me Mr. Murphy or Mr. Gillen, I don't like that. I don't like being called 'mister,' and I don't like being called 'sir.'
I don't mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn't a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated.
I went to school at MIT with a whole bunch of engineers. And then I started work one day and asked myself, 'Why do all of these MIT Ph.D.s work for Harvard M.B.A.s?' Why should it be like that? I was one of those engineers who thought, 'Why are these people making those dumb decisions?' So it's fun to be the person making them.
People have these incredible expectations. So instead of being inspired by, say, Joni Mitchell's music, I look at it and say to myself, 'I'm going to quit - why would I think of writing or performing after listening to that?'
I have no problems with my eyes. It was because when I became big, I suddenly I found myself playing on stage with 200,000 people, and that is scary. I remember my manager told me just put on a pair of sunglasses, and that should mitigate the panic. So I tried it, and it worked.
