Pastoral Resources

You know, my parents have always been incredibly supportive. I'm an only child, so we're very close. There's just the three of us. They're exceptional parents but also great friends. My father was able to take his hobby, photography, and turn it into a beautiful career. So when they saw how much I loved acting, they were 100 percent behind me.

Anybody who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach flunked geography.

I wish more people felt that photography was an adventure the same as life itself and felt that their individual feelings were worth expressing. To me, that makes photography more exciting.

Now, performing is second nature and I love every second of it. It is a very emotional thing when I can't play a song; maybe I'm hitting on something that I don't want to deal with. All of it is so personal. It is like therapy.

Acting is probably the greatest therapy in the world. You can get a lot stuff out of you on the set so you don't have to take it home with you at night. It's the stuff between the lines, the empty space between those lines which is interesting.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

I never wanted to do biography just to tell the life of a famous man. I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

But, Tarantino has seen all of my movies. He's seen my good stuff, he's seen my bad stuff, he's seen the ones I directed, he's read my autobiography. There's an awful lot of things he knows about me, all of which I think had something to do with his casting.

I've tried everything. I've done therapy, I've done colonics. I went to a psychic who had me running around town buying pieces of ribbon to fill the colors in my aura. Did the Prozac thing.

Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

I am very much aware of the visual side of things. I do a lot of photography. I often take Polaroids of things that strike me as visually interesting, just to remember them and perhaps use later.

I'd be cheating everyone here, the staff and rest of my teammates, if I wasn't able to stay on top of my work. It was almost like therapy, to come back and get in an environment I'm comfortable with.

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

And then I wrote my first autobiography when I - well, it was 23 years ago. And since then I've written about one book every two years.