I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and none of the other Backstreet Boys live in Georgia. So a lot of times, when people come to my house they're like, 'Hey, is A.J. here?' Or, 'Is Kevin here?' Or, 'Is Nick in the bathroom?' People think we live together and we spend all the time in the world together, but we really don't.
I felt the way people talked to me was like, 'It's OK to be No. 2 in the NFL, a backup,' and things like that. That's never been my approach.
I really just wanted to be a writer, but people tell you, 'You should have a backup career,' so I thought, 'OK, I'll act.' That was the foolishness of my vision for my life - that my backup career would be completely undependable.
I consider myself a progressive. I have a passion for people who work. To me, this is about forward looking versus backward looking. Ideological gradations are the wrong way to look at it.
The thing I love most about my job is watching people age backward, becoming more lively and energetic as they free themselves from situations that are toxic to their essential selves.
If you don't stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.
I don't make people bend over backwards, and I don't like that in people. I am definitely no diva.
I'm a bookworm. I know with my physical appearance that I don't look like the typical reader. I'm in Barnes & Noble all the time, and you can look at people that look like they are supposed to be in there. I am in there, pants sagging, hat backwards.
Even though this is late in an election year, there is no way we can go forward except together and no way anybody can win except by serving the people's urgent needs. We cannot stand still or slip backwards. We must go forward now together.
At Standing Rock, we experienced, first-hand, people coming together in their communities and trying to use the levers of representative democracy to try and say, 'We don't want this in our community; we don't want this in our backyard,' and corporations using their monetary influence to completely erode that process.
If I found a healing tree in my backyard, and it grew some sort of fruit that was a healing balm for people to repair what was damaged, I'm not going to just harvest all of those fruits and say, 'You cant have this.' If I have a cure for people, I'm going to share it.
Good manners sometimes means simply putting up with other people's bad manners.
There are always people who are into the old way of doing things. I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily, but things change - nothing stays the same. If you can stay true to yourself, you're always going to be legendary.
You can't have the real thing on camera - that's the nature of cinema. When you see people like Daniel Day-Lewis and Ralph Fiennes screaming and hyperventilating, you're seeing the phoniest kind of bad acting. You may as well have a 'men at work' sign. It's not acting if you can see it.
Before I started a company, I was an employee with a bad attitude. I was always felt like, bosses are stupid, and people weren't well treated.
I just feel like we as a human race tend to fear that which we don't understand. It's cause for a lot of bad things and bad behavior to exist on the planet. Artists have a way of touching people and changing minds in a way that sometimes other mediums don't.
It's very difficult to make a 100% turnaround. It's tough when you actually do exhibit patterns of bad behavior. You need to have a very strong support system of people who are willing to keep you in your place if you're going to overcome these things.
Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.
White people get to do that all of the time. They get to engage in bad behavior, even felonious behavior, but they rarely wind up in jail. But as a black person, losing your temper can cost you your life. Or insisting on your rights can cost you your life.
I will overlook bad behavior if I know that people's intentions are good. I have this belief that people really can do good things and that people want to be good.
