I've never been very fully employed either.
Modern life cannot be constructed on . . . physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles.
The difference nowadays is that when I go on vacation I work some of the time rather than all of the time.
Careers don't seem to be built up in the same way as they were in the 80s.
I've always had to move between a couple of years of unemployment, where offers are not provocative enough to take, and seasons where I work nonstop for a year. It's always been an erratic rhythm.
What you've seen from the 1980s, particularly in this country, is far fewer people doing Saturday jobs and doing jobs after school.
Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more so, an afternoon and evening worker.
Sometimes I work purely 8-12 shifts, banging stuff into the computer. Other times, my office is like a scene from a detective movie, with Post-it Notes, plans, photographs all stuck on the walls and arrows going everywhere, and it's 4 A.M.
There is a myth that Rahman sir only works at night. He works through the day and night, so it depends what time slot you end up working with him. Besides nights, I have sung for him in the morning and at noon, too. I think he's the first composer to work at night, and that's why it's spoken about so much.
My mum always says work goes in waves: you have a good spell and then it dips.
If you're not working, over time you're much more likely to develop attitudes and orientations and behavior patterns that are associated with casual or infrequent work. And then when you open up opportunities for people, you notice that these attitudes, orientations, habits and styles also change.
I think that sleep and work are very closely related - not because you can work while you're sleeping and sleep while you're working. That's not really what I mean. I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based, or stage-based, events.
I'm always interested in seeing how other artists work. I want to know what their working patterns are. I even like to know if they listen to music when they draw or what time of day they draw, even materials they use, what they research, if they use photographs.
There are a lot of people in this business that don't work consistently.
Getting work in theater has always been sort of cyclical.
My schedule, it always looks like it's really steady, but believe it or not, I tend to work a bunch and then take a year off.
I do more work in Britain than I do anywhere else in the world.
