I try to keep in my mind the simple question: Am I trying to do good or make myself look good? Too many of our responsibilities get added to our plate when we are trying to please people, impress people, prove ourselves, acquire power, increase our prestige. All those motivations are about looking good more than doing good.

The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations.

Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.

I don't think immortality is necessarily the key to understanding the world. You have to be careful with what you think you're achieving. I'm all for science discovering amazing and fantastic things about our world, but I think the motivations behind it are slightly askew.

Beauty can be born out of not only love, but also pain and other motivations.

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.

We have today a fairly thorough knowledge of the early Greco-Roman period because our motivations are the same.

I'm a better person in a relationship and I'm a happier person. I need to come home at the end of the day and have it not be about me and my freaking hair and makeup and character motivations anymore. And I think my work is more inspired when home is safe and sound and solid because what I do for a living is so bananas and so insecure.

You can't be funny for funny's sake. You try to get as outrageous situation as you can but it always has to be believable and based in real character motivations and what people would really do.

Well yeah. At a certain point you've got to be really honest with yourself. Like 'Why am I doing this? What are my motivations?' Like if you get into it because you want to be famous? Then you've got a long row to hoe. But if you really feel like it's a labour of love and it's something you're actually legitimately good at then it's not that hard to keep plugging away.

I don't think immortality is necessarily the key to understanding the world. You have to be careful with what you think you're achieving. I'm all for science discovering amazing and fantastic things about our world but I think the motivations behind it are slightly askew.