Looking for meaning in the ordinary seems like the most urgent thing that we can do.

Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.

The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.

For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.

If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.

I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.

Play is this process of operating the world, of manipulating things. It's related to experimentation, and it's related to pleasure, but not defined by it.

We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.

It's not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful.

The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.

There's just an enormous vast universe of possible intrigue out there and why not pay attention to it? Because then you're not burdened with trying to find that meaning in yourself all the time.

Revolutions arise from obstinacy. People are dissatisfied with what they are told and they develop new ideas.

Nature time and patience are the three great physicians.

Well, I don't think there's any need for people to focus on my career.

I'm not a big fan of being a victim. I don't like getting beaten up.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

Internalized sexism that makes us feel like we can't show ourselves not being perfect.

I have always been a Malibu Man, like all actors.

When I campaigned, I'd let them throw a punch, but by gosh, I'd throw two back. I always said, the first rule in politics is never defend, always attack. I still believe that.

There's daggers in men's smiles.

Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.