A good marriage is different to a happy marriage.

Never say never, but the thought of electively cutting oneself is beyond my grasp, and I also object to it politically. Denying the lines on our faces makes a comment about age and wisdom I don't care to make.

I was born in Glasgow. But my family is pretty much from a little town called Paisley, famous for its cotton mills and paisley pattern.

I was training to be a lawyer... I was president of the law society at Glasgow University, and my bass guitarist was my secretary of my law society; the lead guitarist and writer worked at the law firm that I worked.

I love to spend a lot of time on my own. I can seriously go into my own head and often love to let myself travel where I don't know where I'm going.

The problem with my mind is it sways from side to side. The idea of me fantasizing about becoming an actor quickly led to depression. 'No, it was never going to happen to me.' I was a sixteen-year-old kid on the other side of the world from where they made movies. Scottish actors never really got play. There was Sean Connery, and that was it.

I wasn't going to be an actor. I was going to be a lawyer. I came from a family just above working class, just below middle class, a great family of wonderful values. The idea of me having a chance for a law degree was enticing. Enticing to me but also very enticing to my family.

My father's very public life as Famous Amos was the opposite of that of his ex-wife, my mother Shirley, who was fighting a very private, solitary battle with mental illness.

The Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookie was an unexpected, unplanned pop culture phenomena. My father went from star-maker to star.

While not a musician, my father was a music agent for years before becoming pop culture icon Famous Amos.

Of course, screwed up families are not the exclusive province of the famous. Still, most families get to screw up in private.

Many cities make music, but no city breathes music quite like Memphis. The songs and sounds that come from here are uniquely American.

Schizoaffective disorder is a big mental mash-up of a disease. It combines just about every disorder, from depression, delusions, and paranoia to mania, schizophrenia and hallucinations. My mother bounced between all of these regularly while raising me alone in our Hollywood home.

If I were a rock star, I'd design my own clothes. I'd do it because that's the mark of a true rock star.

It's one of the central problems of American culture: telling you if you're younger, more beautiful, more famous, whatever, that then you'll be happy.

I remember when I was at Brandeis, Geoffrey Wolff, he was a great fiction-writing teacher. He was the writer-in-residence, and for those of us who wanted to be writers, you were so excited to be in the same hallway as him.

Spielberg read the 'Understudy' and decided that was the voice he wanted to write 'Smash.' He wanted a story that had humanity and humor and high-stakes dreams.

To enjoy being famous, you need to have a screw loose.

You know, I did not like being famous. It was a stressful and ugly time, and I'm glad it's over.

You know, it shouldn't just be about women as heroic figures overcoming things, it just needs to be about women in general getting the opportunity to play a multitude of roles, telling a multitude of stories - just to express human experience from a woman's perspective. I hope, someday, we can get to that point. I'm all about representation.

People don't have these tidy little redemption arcs in reality the way they do in movies.

I absolutely relate to being alone in squalor, trying to come up with something adequate. I relate to that, and I've been known to crawl out of bed and drink out of a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke.

Put your blog out into the world and hope that your talent will speak for itself.

I am not hugely famous; I am not a name. For me, it's not the size of the role, it's the material and the people you are working with.

I didn't become an actor to make money. And I didn't become an actor to be famous - though people always gasp if you say that, as if it's unfathomable that an actor doesn't want to be a star.

When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people. I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute. I didn't experience racism there. The first time I did was in London. It was that moment that you realize you're black. A kind of lifting of the veil.

I think if we don't understand history, if we don't keep referring back to it, we become complacent. And complacency, as we all know, it leads to repeating history.

I don't like hobbies. I read and travel and see my friends before they disown me.

The most famous actress who did the 'dumb blond' routine was Marilyn Monroe, but she was a genius actress.

I do remember a teacher telling me when I was about ten that I was really good at acting. I was so proud, even though I am sure he said that to all of us in the class.

Personally, I think fidelity is important. I don't see any point in being together if you're not being honest, having fun together, and respecting one another. Why would you stay in a relationship otherwise?

I'm in a monogamous relationship and have been for many, many years. I think it's a choice. I don't think you can generalize, though, and what works for me may not work for other people, but I don't think everybody cheats. We're all different.

I played old men back in drama school. It's just now that I'm drawing level with the age of the characters I play, but I'm fine with that, and I've certainly never envied people who became hugely famous when they were young.

I was the youngest child and got a lot more freedom than my brother and sister. I used to wander, doing my own thing under the radar, but I didn't get in bad, bad trouble.

With 'Duplicity', I was a little bit like, 'This isn't that hard of a movie.' This isn't like some huge brain trust of a movie. You gotta be a little bit awake to follow the plot, but it's really just a kind of light entertainment. It's like those Cary Grant movies, which are not meant to be anything other than diverting. In a nice way.

I consider myself an atheist. My wife is Jewish. And I'm fine with my son being raised as a Jew. He's learning Hebrew and is really into it. I will talk to my own son about my atheism when the time is right. But there's a great tradition of Jewish atheism, there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews.

As an actor, to have achieved financial stability is amazing. But I always have this weird fear that I'm not going to get any more work; it's about not having enough money.

My mom just didn't put a very high premium on me being like really famous or really wealthy or anything.

At this point, I don't get hired a lot because people don't think I could finance a movie.

The word 'equality' shows up too much in our founding documents for anyone to pretend it's not the American way.

It's long been accepted as fact that the availability of family planning services saves lives. Where women have access to these services, children and families are healthier, and society at large benefits.

Although I get so much fan mail from Great Britain, tell me, am I more famous there than Michael Madsen?

I'm essentially a momma's boy with a good education.

When I was a teenager, you wanted to go to the movies. Go and see 'Mean Streets,' go and see 'The Conversation,' go and see 'Taxi Driver.'

The international media concentrates on the famous, the big names. Al Jazeera goes to the margins, investigates stories that are still developing and in the future become very big. Why did the Arabic world love Al Jazeera? Everybody felt he was represented in the newsroom and on the screen. That kind of belonging is ours.

There is a very deep conviction in the heart of the people who work in al-Jazeera that if it changes its editorial line, it will very quickly lose its audience. Al-Jazeera has its own style; it has more than 3,500 employees, and I don't think anyone will have the attitude of changing it because they will lose.

The Arab spring that began in 2010 was driven by the educated youth who were connected to the outside world. They had visions of liberal politics derived from social networks. They used innovative means to spread awareness and to network among activists.

Some people call it the 'Al Jazeera spirit' - courage, re-thinking authority, giving a voice to the voiceless. We have never been favored by the authority. The human being is the center of our editorial policy. We are not a TV station that rushes after stars, big names, press conferences, hand-shake journalism.

Decide very early on: do you want to be an actor or do you want to be famous? Because they're very different routes.

Save your rejections so that later when you are famous you can show them to people and laugh.