The bigger your platform gets - it kind of feels like being Godzilla sometimes. You make a slight move and you can accidentally knock over a building. It's a tough thing to navigate.
It's kind of hard for you to be doing huge things and still be knowing what's happening on the street level.
I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities.
I'm from New York, and I started in New York, which I think is a huge advantage because I wasn't overwhelmed by the city. I understood the city. All of the distractions that could come with somebody that started comedy in New York didn't really happen for me.
We're very lucky in England: everything's very structured. But in India you have to deal with chaos, and I think that helps dealing with expectation.
Failing to grapple with complexity actually turns out to be a pretty bad life strategy.
You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
Public men have, however, to pick their steps as best they may, for the straight path would lead too often to the cliff-edge.
After the first ball is bowled, it's only chaos. What you are trying to do is you're trying to manage the chaos. It's not like a script that happens.
The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.
In the labyrinth of a difficult text, we find unmarked forks in the path, detours, blind alleys, loops that deliver us back to our point of entry, and finally the monster who whispers an unintelligible truth in our ears.
The law seems like a sort of maze through which a client must be led to safety, a collection of reefs, rocks, and underwater hazards through which he or she must be piloted.
The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
I think the toughest thing for me to figure out, as an actor, was how to translate all those layers that are in there and that history that the writers have done such a great job at forming.
We get to get into the nitty-gritty and the minutiae of the way they relate now, and that's really valuable. We just have to make sure we don't repeat ourselves and we plot this thing so it doesn't dead end too much, and so that's the challenge really. It's like, how do you keep those balls in the air and make it exciting still?
