I'm not trying to keep up or adapt. I'm allowing myself to grow, evolve and create new music.
I just think that I'm a person who's trying to find the truth and express it as I, you know, get the opportunity.
The work I've done is the work I know, and the work I do is the work I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing.
Minneapolis just embraced me. There are a lot of weirdos here. It's awesome, because I'm a weirdo. Thankfully, the city embraced me with open arms. A lot about Minneapolis helped carve my musicality and open my eyes. The whole town is so open-minded compared to like, you know, Texas.
I could take my time, and nobody was pressuring me to be a headliner. I could go up there, find my voice, and figure out what I wanted to do.
Lana is 100 percent an extension of me, but just one side of me. I feel that's what I get really excited about because on 'Total Divas,' you are going to see other sides of me.
We have to get children to understand that not only do they have this incredible uniqueness, but they also have something that sometimes we forget about. They are also potentiality. They are much more undiscovered than they are discovered. And there's the wonder of it. It doesn't matter where they are, they're only just beginning and the big magical trip of life is digging it all out and discovering the wonderful you.
I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself.
Everyone in those days expected that art students were wild, licentious characters. We didn't know how to be, but we sure were anxious to learn.
Every time I choose a role, I see whether it excites me and offers me the potential to challenge myself.
I wouldn't be myself if I weren't always trying to be someone else. I only have so much time on this earth and I want to be as many people as possible.
Some people go off to an ashram or they, you know, have a midlife crisis and buy a sports car. For me, I do 'Hedwig,' and I see it's a midlife crisis maybe, and I see what's next. And it's a good trampoline, maybe, into the next part of my life.
There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos.
The more time we invest imitating others, the less that's available to discover and be ourselves.
When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound.
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
The past nine years in San Diego have represented such a period of questioning.
I love pretending to be other people. The more unlike me they are the better - I find other people endlessly fascinating and myself incredibly boring.
I loved everything. I read everything. Art and poetry and literature and trash and sci fi. I didn't know what I would become yet and I needed to read to figure it out.
For an actor to have the chance to go and play something that's far away from yourself, physically and also in terms of personality, character, is so much fun.
What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.
I was pushing myself to extremes in order to discover my many selves.
Anything that's different from your own realm of experience as a human being, whether it's driving a car or a boat, or using guns, anything that separates you from yourself and leads you more towards this character's existence is a big help.
Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.
If I die... I'd be so mad at myself that I didn't explore that side of me.
