A Quote by Richard P. Feynman
Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.
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Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.
I'm an ensemble guy, I guess - that comes from the theater. If I ever won some kind of award someday, I imagine I'd try to be very gracious, but in the end, I just want to keep working. I don't see why that, if you just put your mind to it and keep sowing the right seeds, you can't keep doing the things you want to do.
Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that.
What's the level of compromise for making that kind of money? How far do I have to sell my soul? What's the price of that? And I don't know if I want to make those kind of compromises any more. I think I'm a different person. I think I've matured to a great extent. I think that I want different things now. That it's not about the celebrity status that you receive because you're doing the next hot movie. It's about doing good work.
I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification. And in a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.
I want to do roles that are fun and challenging and I want to try different things. I don't want to keep doing Monster's Ball over and over and over again. I want to keep doing my career the way that I was doing it before I won the Oscar.
I think everybody should be able to do anything they want and let roving bands of people punish each other for things they don't agree with. People with no underwear doing anything they want. Wouldn't that be fun? You wouldn't need television.
I keep reading about people who want to be famous - it's not that they want to be great songwriters or great actors, they want to be celebrities. That is scary because you can be famous doing some really stupid things.
I grew up listening to John Coltrane and jazz, so they were subtle influences. I sometimes think about doing some kind of weird jazz record, but I don't know... It's on my list of things to do. I don't want to have to then go promote it.
Amanda [Bynes] and I are the same age so I grew up watching her and really looking up to her and for me, to see this path that's happening and to watch it, is kind of really affecting me in ways that I didn't think it would. It's weird to be in a situation where you can't help. I obviously don't know her at all but I want to bring her back and I want to make her happy and healthy for some reason and she's not there and we can't do anything to help so it kind of sucks. All we're doing is hurting it.
I worry very much about kids growing up in a society where they think: "I'm not going to talk about this issue, read this book or explore this idea because someone may think I'm a terrorist." That's not the kind of free society I want for our children.
I never sought to be a pundit, or on TV, or a writer-it just kind of came to me. If you just keep doing what you want to do, you wind up doing precisely what you want to be doing. Don't resist how life bats you around.
I try not to think of myself in any category, and I don't ever really try to imagine myself competing with another actor. I just know I want to do the things that I would want to see, and I know the things that turn me on, whether it's on the stage, or it's a play or a film. I just kind of want to keep doing my own thing.
Ultimately, I love making music more than anything. And I want to do that for ever. I don't want be on the top. I just want to keep doing what I'm doing.
I think that to me, films are personal affairs. It doesn't mean that I am against other people doing things differently, but I'm talking about what I can do. So I don't feel comfortable going to a new city or a certain class of which I don't have sufficient knowledge, doing research on that, and then writing a story about it I don't think I have the ability of presenting other people on screen in that way. It makes me uncomfortable. This doesn't mean that I only want to talk about myself. I want to talk about what I know.
I think everyone has to have some kind of hiatus at some point, if only for people to get nostalgic and remember. Then it comes back with a bigger bang. In the meantime, you have to keep busy doing other things.
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