The course that I have uniformly pursued, ever since I became a missionary, has been rather peculiar. In order to become an acceptable and eloquent preacher in a foreign language, I deliberately abjured my own. When I crossed the river, I burnt my ships.
If we carry on filling up the calendar, we keep on pushing the athlete, we shorten the athletes longevity. The risk is to shorten a career that could have lasted 10 years because the athlete is burnt out.
Like I said about Freaked, people tend to find these films, and I think that in the end the cool thing about a movie is that it can be sort of burnt temporarily, but then it's burnt into the fabric of your culture.
When I think of the library of Alexandria and of the fact that, although it burnt down, people continue to sort the letters of the alphabet according to that tradition, then that makes certain expressions of modernity, even of interventions on the textual level, possible.
I was tired and I had overworked myself and burnt myself out. So I went to Egypt by myself. When I saw what was built there, it made me understand how powerful we are, that we can create anything. And I felt like I needed to create things that were timeless too.
I went through a phase of deep introspection. I realised that while doing films back to back, I was getting burnt out and not concentrating on quality. I wasn't preparing for my role and was working like a machine. When I saw the result on the big screen, I felt that the work I'd done was horrible.
I think, sometimes, you can just get really burnt out on something you enjoy doing and feel like the sponge is completely wrung dry.
After the Pussycat Dolls, I was burnt out. So when I left them in 2010, I did take a second to say, 'Right, I've done this for seven years. Who the hell am I as an individual? Do I still want to do this?'
We never learnt the right lessons. We never went to the root of the problem. Once you start politicising religion, you play with fire and get burnt as well. Another lesson we did not learn is that Muslims are not homogenous.
In my view, the adults are the burnt generation of Iraq for whom nothing can be done. But for the children, we can worry now, we can talk about them, we can plan for them, we can get our protest heard by others.
