Stealing bases was put to me almost as a prerequisite for staying in the game. They didn't give me a handbook on how to do it; they said do it. Under those conditions you go out and develop your own handbook.
I'm going to keep talking about what I think is interesting for my entire career. If you want to hear about how women do a lot of shoe shopping or how being married sucks, go see the guy who does jokes about that. But if you come to see my live show, there's going to be 20 minutes on religion for the rest of my life, probably. If that makes me a caricature, so be it.
With devices my technique is always to hide the handbook in the drawer until I've played with it for a while. The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it's a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren't predicted in the handbook, or that they didn't consider desirable. It's normally those other things that interest me.
The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, 'You have to change something in the handbook.'
It's a cliche, but there really is no handbook about the celebrity thing; you have to figure it out as you go along
It's a cliche, but there really is no handbook about the celebrity thing; you have to figure it out as you go along.
A black woman's handbook in this industry is, 'Whoa.' The chapter on 'Don't go there.' The chapter on 'How to say that nicely,' how to express that you don't like something so that you don't lose the opportunity - which is what we're doing all day long.
Everyone in their career is going to go through a slump, but the thing is how you react to it. You're either going to talk about it or you're going to try to shoot your way out of it and I'm going to try to shoot my way out of it.
I'm not going to pre-empt anything regarding how my career's going to go because I'm always prepared for the worst.
I'm very cautious about talking about how actors got where they got, as though there is in fact a plan or a way. There is no plan, there is no way, there's no sure set, there's no handbook, on how to get to be an actor.
Treat your career like a bad boyfriend...
Your career wont take care of you. It won't call you back or introduce you to its parents. Your career will openly flirt with other people while you are around... You have to care about your work, but not about the result. You have to care about how good you are and how good you feel, but not about how good people think you are or how good people think you look.
I'm not really struggling about my career. The struggles are in my personal life. I can't really pinpoint how long it took me to get where I'm at, and I didn't care how long it was going to take, because it's not about the destination, it's about the journey.
I realized I had a novel on my hands, but didn't know where it was going to go. So I thought, 'I'm going to do everything that you're not supposed to do when you plan a novel; I'm going to step back and let this thing take itself wherever it wants to go, and I'm not going to worry about how things connect until later on.
I realized I had a novel on my hands, but didn't know where it was going to go. So I thought, 'I'm going to do everything that you're not supposed to do when you plan a novel; I'm going to step back and let this thing take itself wherever it wants to go, and I'm not going to worry about how things connect until later on.'
I'd say imagine that you wake up one morning when you're going through a midlife crisis. You're getting divorced. Your kids won't speak to you. Their faces are covered with acne, and you have to decide why you should get out of bed. That's the career you should pick. The one that keeps you going no matter what, even if your life is falling apart. That's how I feel about my career.
There's a time in everyone's career where you go, 'Ah, this is hard - how long am I going to have to do this?' But the rewards are so great. Who gets to go on the podium and hear the national anthem? The whole nation singing! Money can't buy you that.