Throughout the time in which I am working on a canvas I can feel how I am beginning to love it, with that love which is born of slow comprehension.
Every time you do a true story - and I've done a few - you have to look in the mirror and say, 'That's close enough. I'm comfortable with this.' You're always going to compress time; you're going to change the order of things. But I don't think you want to tell a big lie. You want to think that you're embracing the truth.
I think, television and comics, what's appealing to me as a writer about both of those mediums is that they allow you to sort of let the story unfold in its own time as opposed to trying to compress it into a two-hour discreet unit of narrative.
Sometimes you go into a film and you have no time to prepare and have to compress the details into a few days and then rely on the instinct and what happens when you're in a scene with other actors and that chemistry or not.
With 'Sin Nombre,' there are parts that I wish were longer. And with 'Jane Eyre' especially, there were parts that I had to compress that I thought it would have been really nice to spend more time with - to spend with the characters.
I don't do any exercises when flying but use compression socks and spend as much time as possible lying down. I try not to eat much - I'm not a fan of airplane food; everything is just so weird.
I've just always been interested in alter-naturalism and seeing if you can make real life interesting enough to be dramatic without enhancing it. Like, could you make a movie or write a play in which there's no compression of time, there's no enhanced event, it's just real life?
I tell the story by feel most of the time, and I am not much given to labyrinthian digressions but seem to be naturally drawn to compression and pace, and the feelings come about on their own.
People need to understand that the Lauryn Hill they were exposed to in the beginning was all that was allowed in that arena at the time. I had to step away for the sake of the machine. I was being way too compromised. I felt uncomfortable having to smile in someone's face when I really didn't like them or know them well enough to like.
I don't take pictures when I'm with my kids, for the sake of my kids. It's important when you're as busy as I am that you give your kids your time when you're with them, and nothing compromises that. I've been lucky enough to have fans that understand that.
'American Graffiti' was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time, and I was compromising myself to death.
I love science fiction, but I have a hard time feeling for characters in a galaxy far away. Choosing movies is the one thing in my life where there's no compromising.
I've been saying to people for a long time, 'If you're not doing something you're tremendously excited about, and you're not feeling passionate about it, you're compromising yourself every day.'
I think people who become compulsive about fitness or eating right, a lot of the time it's out of fear that they're going to lose control or that they're not good enough, so I think anything done out of fear or motivated by fear is often unhealthy.
I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.
No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time.
The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations, and to eliminate human liability to error is probably as old as the science of arithmetic itself.
We have lived through the flood time of fascism and of the nazism which ran its meteoric course at a cost to mankind in suffering and waste beyond all computation.
It is time to create new social science departments that reflect the breadth and complexity of the problems we face as well as the novelty of 21st-century science. These would include departments of biosocial science, network science, neuroeconomics, behavioral genetics and computational social science.
You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your hand, and onto the page or computer screen - it becomes distorted, and it's been diminished.
