There is a great relief in experiencing the worst vicariously.

Irish people are educated not only about artistry but local history.

Acting doesn't have to be threadbare misery all the time.

I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born.

To be honest I live among the English and have always found them to be very honest in their business dealings. They are noble, hard-working and anxious to do the right thing. But joy eludes them, they lack the joy that the Irish have.

A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.

Theater is dangerously open to repetition. It's exciting when you hit on a new way.

My mother taught me to read.

The word democracy has no meaning. Duty has gone. Only rights remain.

People who are good at film have a relationship with the camera.

Theater dates very quickly.

I think America becomes more disgruntled by going to the movies and having an endlessly good time at them.

There once was a demographic survey done to determine if money was connected to happiness and Ireland was the only place where this did not turn out to be true.

I certainly had no intention of playing a man.

I can hardly decide what plays I should be in.

Once you've done one style, you leave it for a while.

I would love to write the story of my upbringing in Ireland.

I just think that things should be allowed to run their course, and not turned into a Disney ride.

Every generation is obsessed with the decade before they were born.

So I just play the character, I play the lines.

I take the theater seriously in that I loathe it, I'm bored by it.

The energy released by it is enormous and it becomes quite addictive, the power between the audience and the actor.

I had a ball doing Harry Potter.

Also, an area that interests me - and it will probably take years to state what I mean - is the period of the rise of democracy, with Tom Paine, which is around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th.

The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.

This whole tribal loyalty seems to have gone.

One moment cannot be the most important.

Even when they have nothing, the Irish emit a kind of happiness, a joy.

I find it incredibly tedious, hate that it murders itself with its own conservative pomposity.

There is a great relief in experiencing the worst vicariously.

There was no professional theater in Cork, but still I did a lot of performing.

There's something about the Irish that is remarkable.

For 'Barnyard,' I did the voice of a 'chick,' which was really a blast because I had to manipulate my voice to another pitch.

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them and let them hurt me.

Sometimes, you've got to work a little, so you can ball a lot.

My first instrument was my voice. I was always singing and writing melodies when I was a little kid. I just sort of taught myself whatever was around. If there were instruments around, I'd play them. I always liked the idea of not being shown but coming up with my own energetic connection to the instrument.

Everything that I'm attempting to do is based on my understanding of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and what he wanted for his people.

We are either progressing or retrograding all the while. There is no such thing as remaining stationary in this life.

One of the values of centering prayer is that you are not thinking about God during the time of centering prayer so you are giving God a chance to manifest. In centering prayer there are moments of peace that give the psyche a chance to realize that God may not be so bad after all. God has a chance to be himself for a change.

The greatest of the greats wouldn't be the greatest of the greats if they didn't try stuff, you know what I mean?

And so we said to General Motors that the solution had to be a first year increase, which had to be sizeable because we bad to catch up with the lost position as against the cost of living and we had to make some progress.

All I'm doing is rearranging the curtains in the insane asylum.

In silent movies, they tended to put the camera down, and everybody walked in front of it and acted, and then they all walked off. Cutting was quite infrequent.

I can't say that I'm always writing in my head but I do spend a lot of time in my head writing or coming up with ideas. And what I do usually is write the music and melody and then, you know, maybe the basic idea. But when I feel that I don't have a song or just say, God, please give me another song. And I just am quiet and it happens.

I'd promised my older daughter Rhianna I was going to get a medal for her, and in my mind I was thinking, 'I can't let her down.'

Obviously God knew I wasn't going to make it to the NBA as much as I probably believed. This was divine order.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

I'd retired for about six or seven years. Coming back to the business, I found that I was sort of not quite a has-been, and it wasn't a new career, it was just kind of difficult to crack the nut, so to speak.

My grandfather was a practising Quaker. My father was a nihilist. But nihilism, if you like, is the beginning of faith anyway.