People wanted to be friends with me for not the right reasons. They'd introduce me to somebody else as the Olympian or the swimmer. I didn't want to stand out. I wanted to blend in.
Being a stand-up comic, this isn't a stepping-stone for me; it's what I do, and this is what I'm always going to do. And even if I do a TV show, the only reasons to do a TV show is to get more people to know me to come out to my stand-up shows.
We can always find something to be thankful for, and there may be reasons why we ought to be thankful for even those dispensations which appear dark and frowning.
In a way, I don't want to know what's being said in casting offices, because it can get pretty brutal, and I don't want to have to think about the reasons why I don't get one job or do get one job.
The thing with 'Alphas' is that, even though it's sci-fi, I run into lots of people that have watched the show for various reasons. They're like, 'I had no expectation, and I'm totally blown away and fascinated.'
I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.
If you're making music for all the right reasons, people are going to be receptive to that and appreciate it the same way you did when your were writing it.
When I came back to Washington to be The Times' chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.
I tend to edit some as I go - partly because one of the reasons I don't outline much is that I don't know what the next scene will be until I've actually written the previous scene.
