Unknown in Paris, I was lost in the great city, but the feeling of living there alone, taking care of myself without any aid, did not at all depress me. If sometimes I felt lonesome, my usual state of mind was one of calm and great moral satisfaction.
I have to have a little bit of time to myself right before whatever it is that I have to do because most of the time I'm sitting in my head convincing myself to calm down, all right, show down.
If I want to calm down, I'll buy some fabric, get a pattern, shut myself in a room and stay there for days, really happy. And at the end of it, you get a bedspread or some curtains or something to wear - it's lovely.
Humility is a super-important factor in all of our lives, and I try to remind myself every evening in front of the mirror, 'Just calm down.'
When I hit my thirties, that's when I calmed down and I wasn't so tough on myself. I wasn't doing the yo-yo dieting any more. I gave myself a break. I think that, if you're more accepting of yourself, you're more free and open and can just allow more people in.
I've calmed down. Looking back, I was engaged more in dramas than I was in relationships. I've spent a lot of my life being in it for the plot, and I don't do that anymore. I'm satisfied. I'm not competing with myself. I accomplished things I wanted to do, so everything I do now is because I want to, not because I'm trying to prove something.
In my twenties, I thought I was Robert De Niro and I invested all of myself in my acting. But, as I've got older, I've calmed down a bit. I've thrown my game plan out of the window.
The director calmed me down and told me I was being too hard on myself. He went on to say that I wasn't quite as bad as I thought, but needed to tone things down a bit.
I've experienced racism and homophobia my whole life, so I've trained myself to just deal with it calmly, to not cause a scene, and to find a way to calm the situation down.
When I was a young student, I only listened to foreign music, mainly rock music and hard rock. Then I surprised myself by discovering ethnic music. Now I like to listen to music from different places, and in many situations. Even when you work, some ethnic music calms the nerves.
Yoga is the best holistic workout and body toner there is. It sorts out a chaotic mind and calms the body - it is how I de-stress - or stop myself getting stressed in the first place.
If the world is in complete flux for me and life is falling apart, if I just manage to get myself in front of a computer or at my desk, it calms.
I draw a lot of comparisons with Cam Newton and E.J. Manuel. But for the mental part, I like to view myself as Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and those guys. Because they're so ahead of everyone else when it comes to that part of the game.
My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.
Clothes are my drug. I love Camden market - I have so many vintage pieces from there it's unbelievable. Clothes are really important to me, they give me that feeling of happiness. I love being a bit free with it all and not giving myself rules.
I might be in an airport, late or angry with a ticket person, and I'm going to sort of check myself, because part of me is seen as Eric Camden. We all need as much help as we can get. It's a role model to me as much as to anybody else.
There's a joke that I do where I make fun of myself for being bow-legged, and I compare myself to a camel and how a camel walks and sits, and that has become a joke that people - when I deliver that joke, people are in tears.
Cars and cameras are the two things I let myself be materialistic about. I don't care about other stuff.
As a young actor, I found myself in all these movies at once, with two big trilogies and a Cameron Crowe film and working with Ridley Scott a couple of times.
In 'The Goods,' I'm Ed Helms' dad, and I was known all those years as Kirk Cameron's father, and now I'm known as Robin Thicke's father, so I find myself playing myself a lot and, frankly, living up to expectations of what the public's image of me is.
