There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
I love the idea of constantly altering yourself.
When I lived in Beijing in 1996, it was a horizontal city. If you wanted to go out for a burger, if you wanted to really treat yourself, you went to this place called the Jianguo Hotel. The architect had proudly described it as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn that he had seen in Palo Alto, California.
One of the great issues in biology is the origin of altruism - of why you would do something for someone else that could hurt you - and Darwin posited that it might be rooted in maternal instinct, in sacrificing yourself for your children.
Altruism raises your mood because it raises your self-esteem, which increases happiness. Plus, giving to others gets you outside of yourself and distracts you from your problems.
I'm not totally altruistic. I've always had great career ambitions. But it has to come out in an organic way. If you push yourself out beyond where you are supposed to be, there's this pressure.
Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
Acting is something I appreciate, and I think it's been an amazing experience. But I'm not passionate about acting the way you probably should be to call yourself an actor.
I love the exploration of someone who has such a different background from you. That exploration runs to compassion and to cracking yourself open and creating more understanding of how weird and amazing life is.
Why make life so dull when you can make it exciting and meet amazing people and go to countries and see things? You make life the way you want it to be. A lot of people don't realize that at the end of the day, the ultimate control of what you do and your destiny, it lies in the way you want to direct yourself.
I just feel like, with growing up and having peer pressure and what society wants you to be and what you think you should do, I feel like it's really important to surround yourself around good, understanding, amazing people that actually love you for you.
Directing is a really kind of amazing thing, because you're helping others and, in the middle of that, you have to worry about yourself.
When you're challenged to the extreme, you learn so much about yourself. And when you're willing to give that ultimate sacrifice, when you're willing to tackle a job or a task or a mission head-on and give 100%, you can achieve amazing things because you're almost fearless.
There are amazingly wonderful people in all walks of life; some familiar to us and others not. Stretch yourself and really get to know people. People are in many ways one of our greatest treasures.
What I try to focus on is not to try to stop the march of technological progress. Instead, I try to run faster. If Amazon knows you better than you know yourself, then the game is up.
If you listen to really deep ambient records that don't move too much, very still records, long after those records are finished, you might find yourself listening for hours to the sound of the room.
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.
If you are ambitious to talk well, you must be as much as possible in the society of well-bred, cultured people. If you seclude yourself, though you are a college graduate, you will be a poor converser.
I think that social migration to another economic class requires a kind of negotiating with yourself. And also, there's so much ambivalence in your heart about who you are and who you're really not.
