“The ego is kind of a big, unwieldy thing. It’s not so easily tamed or subdued.”

I felt pride, wonderful pride, when I was captain. It was an honour to take over from Labby. Anybody who has ever captained a big club, which Everton are, will tell you it’s a great honour.

I would say try to tell stories that you care about as opposed to stories that you think will sell.

For me, the thing that I love is that it’s all about the present moment.

It’s a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself.

Beauty is in the strangest places. A piece of garbage floating in the wind. And that beauty exists in America. It exists everywhere. You have to develop an eye for it and be able to see it.

Makes you wonder what else you can do that you’ve forgotten about.

Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is going to cave in.

We don’t have any real sense of community anymore.

I’m from the South, so while I personally find it impossible to live there, I still have a fondness for it as a geographical region.

Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once and it’s too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst.

I would be so bored if that was the case. There would be no journey. There would be nothing to discover.

The important thing is that he shook hands with us over the phone.

There are times when I am directing, and there are a couple of moments I didn’t get the way I wanted, but I know I still have other angles to shoot and I have to be done by noon; I move on.

I’d seen ‘Interview with A Vampire’ and saw Dracula movies growing up, but I never thought, ‘I love vampires; I have to do a show about vampires.’

I mean certainly, you read about things people did to each other in the pursuit of some mystical or occult goal, and it’s horrifying. But that’s just human nature.

I try to tell the best story, and the story that has some heart and some genuine terror and some social commentary and some comedy and some romance and some sex and some violence.

I know that if I could really understand mental illness, then it would be appropriate to make a big career shift.

We want to win. We want to win big. We want to win the whole thing.

My earliest memories of rap music was mixed with my earliest memories of reggae music. They were big sounds around the way, heavy bass lines, strong messages, definitely.

If anyone wants to know why three kids in one family made it to the big leagues they just had to know how we helped each other and how much we practiced back then. We did it every minute we could.

A new dog never replaces an old dog; it merely expands the heart. If you have loved many dogs, your heart is very big.

I don’t have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.

If you can make people understand why freedom is so important through the arts, that would be a big help.

At various points, in big ways and small, we get knocked down. If we stay down, grit loses. If we get up, grit prevails.