If you look at the history of presidential memorials, it takes a long time to get them done.
By the time I got to the Fox studio for my first major film, I knew how to hit a mark. I knew how to memorize lines. I knew how to pay attention.
Theater is a physical activity as much as anything. It's harder for me to learn the lines than it was 30 years ago. At the same time, I'll never quit working in the theater - until I can't memorize two lines back to back.
The first time I saw my wife, Marjorie, I was doing stand-up in Memphis, and she was sitting in the front row. Afterward, I walked up and said, 'Ma'am, I'm going to marry you one day.' And 15 years later, I did.
I certainly hope I'm not still answering child-star questions by the time I reach menopause.
Character is the result of two things: mental attitude and the way we spend our time.
You obviously don't really forget how to play the old songs; you just don't have to spend so much time convincing yourself that you remember them. Way less mental energy is spent swimming around in lyrics you've already written and chords you've already played.
I plan my time to a 'T.' I plan when I am going to sleep; I plan when I am going to relax. I obviously leave time to have spontaneous life experiences - I think that's really important. But so much of it is setting up you mental energy in the right way to get the most out of your day and time.
It's what you do every time. You isolate what you know, and you create a mental image of what you're doing. Every time you speak you don't have to think about it. Words come out of your mouth based on what you know. That's the same job every time.
The results of ethnic psychology constitute, at the same time, our chief source of information regarding the general psychology of the complex mental processes.
Mental toughness is a lifestyle. It's something that you live every single day of your life. When I was growing up, I was a lazy kid. I was a lazy kid, and everybody goes, 'How did you get to where you're at today? How did you get to where you're running 200 miles at one time in 39 hours? Being so disciplined?'
Tennis is all about mental toughness, and you have to keep your head in the game. I make time to relax away from competition pressures, travel and intense training schedules to make sure I'm looking after myself. Taking time out with family and friends helps to maintain the work-life balance everyone needs.
Golf challenges you mentally at any age, and when you become my age, it's a challenge physically to try to make your game work as well as it ever did. That's close to impossible, but that doesn't keep you from trying to hit the ball where you used to hit it and make the putts you used to make all the time.
I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'
Listening sounds like a ridiculous characteristic for mentoring, but genuinely being invested and interested in people, meeting them for cups of coffee and spending time with people, and using the network I've been very lucky to build up to help others are all things I do to help others.
A life of very, very serious, po-faced films would drive me nuts. I need - and I'm fortunate to have - a fairly varied menu in that respect. I mean, I was shooting 'Mamma Mia!' at the same time as I was doing Michael Winterbottom's 'Genova'. That was a very, very bizarre summer.
A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.
Performance was a shock to me. The first time I remember feeling I could do it was during the making of my first video, 'Fun for Me.' I couldn't sleep the night before the shoot, I was so frightened. I had to play a ghost and a piece of merchandise in a shop window, and I had no idea whether I was going to be able to pull it off.
I think a lot of times when people talk about merchants, it's almost a nostalgic look back at the time where the world moved at a very different pace, and information was very different.
Hindsight can be merciless. People of any given era often look back in time and wonder how their predecessors could have been so dimwitted.
