I like learning stuff. The more information you can get about a person or a subject, the more you can pour into a potential project. I made a decision to do different things. I want to do things that have a better chance of being thought of as original. I do everything I can to disrupt my comfort zone.
I probably should have a brand, but I think you can't get the best artists to work for you if you're branded. I get the trade-off, and I really would like to be more famous for my work, get more credit for my achievements.
I try to be thoughtful when I speak but not edited. I make mistakes, but people like vulnerability.
You have to know the weeds - to have lived in them - to delegate. I wouldn't want to be a leader who had never lived in the weeds.
I think that we all absolutely have curiosity. It brings about knowledge. It's energizing. It's spiritually empowering. It makes us more interesting as people.
Being interested in other fields and meeting experts outside entertainment - whether it's a two-hour conversation with John Nash that turns into 'A Beautiful Mind' or talking to people in architecture or fashion, CIA directors or Nobel laureates - has given me a better sense of which ideas feel authentic and new.
You can get good at finding access in the entertainment business. But the ideas, the narratives themselves, they are the only things that are going to be of any value.
It's a simple quality of human nature that people prefer to choose to do things rather than be ordered to do them. In fact, as soon as you tell me I have to do something - give a speech, attend a banquet, go to Cannes - I immediately start looking for ways to avoid doing it.
The hair is part of my image, part of my persona. And the hair is no accident: I have to gel it vertical every single morning.
Hollywood is a land of style, a world where how you present yourself matters. Many of the people working here are so dramatically good-looking - that is their style. That's not me, and I know that.
You should not do everything in your power to make reviewers cranky before - right before they see your movie.
The physical effort of reading drains some of the pleasure I might take from whatever I'm reading.
No one in Hollywood really knows what a good idea is before a movie hits the screens. We only know if it's a good idea after it's done.
I know just how often people get told 'no' to their brilliant ideas - not just most of the time, but 90 percent of the time.
Everybody in Hollywood has to beat the 'no' - and if you write code in Silicon Valley, or if you design cars in Detroit, if you manage hedge funds in Lower Manhattan, you also have to learn to beat the 'no.'
I think the global mass culture is either consciously or unconsciously sensitized to how vulnerable we are here on the planet.
My world was small growing up. I never really left the three-mile radius of my tiny neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.
A movie has to get good reviews, high grosses - it has to beat expectations. The same thing with television and the ratings. But being curious isn't like that. It's not a public thing. It's private, and the test is a private one. You have to be on your toes.
When I am talking to someone, I can constantly see whether I am failing or succeeding. I am regulating what I am saying in terms of how I think I'm doing. I'm always searching for the truth of a subject or person, and I look at every meeting as a grand experiment.
I don't keep a list of people I want to talk to. It's organic. But I'd like to interview Tom Brady. Someday I'd love to meet Vladimir Putin. I'd ask him how he sees the landscape of the world, what could make it better, how that could be done.
