If you are interested in ideas, radio is way more pure than television. You're not distracted by somebody's nose or hair or posture. You can really see how someone thinks and penetrate to the essence of who that person is.
That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.
I prefer radio to television. Radio is a dialogue; television is a monologue. In radio, you have to interact - they put the words in your head; you build the pictures in your mind. To that extent, it is more engaging than television.
Each person may see a fight in different ways... They can see more to a primal way. Others they can see in a pure artistic way... For me I see the pure artistic way, the way that a true martial artist can show his art.
What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?
I get more distracted by hair or a really bad wig than I do costumes any day of the week.
In particular I want to talk about natural black hair, and how it's not just hair. I mean, I'm interested in hair in sort of a very aesthetic way, just the beauty of hair, but also in a political way: what it says, what it means.
People often lump radio and television together because they are both broadcast mediums. But radio, anyway, and the radio I do for NPR, is much closer to writing than it is to television.
The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.
I am more interested in people's attitude than someone who is a perfect face. Every time I walk the streets of London, I see someone who interests me. It doesn't matter how old they are.
I am a more rounded person than you see on television. You don't bark your way to being a success.
The left are not interested in what Chris Christie thinks. They're not interested in what McCain thinks. They're not interested in what Jeb Bush thinks. They're interested in eliminating everything those guys think. They don't care to get along.
There's a whole language to movement and how you embody someone, and how you can use different techniques for different characters. I guess just posture, and the way you walk, and the way you physically are. All of that says a lot about who someone is.
When you wear the costumes in a period drama, you already feel like a different person - the clothes make you stand differently, change your posture, the way you walk. You really have to have stamina - you have two hours in hair and makeup, and then another hour to remove all that.
I'm less interested in how people are following each other and more interested in how they are following topics and tweets themselves. People are following more key words and concepts and more ideas and acting on those rather than individuals or organizations.
Love teaches us how to penetrate the inner worlds, to clean the glass of existence and see reality in its perfect essence.
In radio I had one, maybe two people who cared about getting it done. I'd really be a loser if I forgot where I came from. So I show them the love. And how hard is it really to be interested in someone's life?