Being funny it turns out is like being a bank. It's a confidence trick. As long as everyone believes in you you are fine.

The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny you've immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems needing freedom trying to find a way to cut themselves loose but failing to rid themselves of conscience a sense of sin the whole bag of tricks.

I don't want to end up being a circus act doing my most famous tricks when I'm 70.

Men of Virginia countrymen of Washington of Patrick Henry of Jefferson and of Madison will ye be true to your constitutional faith?

Writing is an act of faith not a trick of grammar.

Positive rights are the right to shelter the right to education the right to health care the right to a living wage. These things are - these are I would call them more properly political rights rather than positive rights. And they are extremely tricky because now we are dealing with things that are zero sum.

I don't remember my dreams. I'm one of those weird people. I know there are tricks and things you can do but I never remember my dreams.

I've had dreams about tricks.

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments it is apt to emerge again and again independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

The demise of Google Reader if logical is a reminder of how far we've come from the cuddly old 'I'm Feeling Lucky' Google days in which there was a foreseeably-astonishing delight in the way Google's evolving design tricks anticipated what users would like.

If I designed a computer with 200 chips I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.

Patrick Henry did not say 'Give me absolutely safety or give me death.' America is supposed to be about freedom.

Death is inevitable but Life - that's the tricky bit where things happen.

For 'The Haunting Hour ' I thought it would be a lot of fun. It was great to play this cool kid role. My episode is called 'The Intruders' and my character is this mean angry teenager because her younger brother was just born and he gets all of the attention. She's always playing tricks on her family and there are some cool twists.

So when I got to be about 13 or 14 I started listening - even though my parents music was way cool - to contemporary hard rock at that time which was Aerosmith Cheap Trick Black Sabbath AC/DC Ted Nugent and all that and that's just where I came from.

If the choice is between doing something supercool and having no one hear it and doing something equally cool and tricking people into putting it on the radio I don't think the second option is some big sellout.