Quotes About Balance

It's really fun to go back and forth from acting projects to directing projects. You don't have as much responsibility when you're acting, but you have more fun. But then you miss having that responsibility, and so you go back and torture yourself and make a movie.

I ran through most of college and ran through most of grad school. When I was writing my dissertation for my Ph.D., it was literally the only hour of the day that I wasn't working. It was nine months of torture, but I made sure I got out to run.

I am very lucky that I get to go to work and laugh all day for my day job, and then go home and torture my artistic self.

Just because I'm talking about something that might have been a sad or painful situation doesn't mean that I'm sad or tortured 24 hours a day any more than anybody else is.

I think there are ways to get so caught up in your career and being so heavy and dramatic, and everyone wants to be a tortured genius.

I'm not a tortured soul.

I'm a guy who has problems with moderation. All or nothing. Binge and purge. Kill or be killed. Gray is not a color I wear well. I should be dead. I know that. I should not be successful. I know that too. My daily existence is a toss of the coin - one side, fear, the other side, gratitude.

You may have heard of the Slow Movement, which challenges the canard that faster is always better. You don't have to ditch your career, toss the iPhone, or join a commune to take part. Living 'Slow' just means doing everything at the right speed - quickly, slowly, or at whatever pace delivers the best results.

Our life is the sum total of all the decisions we make every day, and those decisions are determined by our priorities.

Temperance is moderation in the things that are good and total abstinence from the things that are foul.

My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others' negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.

To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.

There's design, and there's art. Good design is total harmony. There's no better designer than nature - if you look at a branch or a leaf, it's perfect. It's all function. Art is different. It's about emotion. It's about suffering and beauty - but mostly suffering!

I don't want to paint a picture of total gloom and doom.

Definitely for me, my personality, having children was a definite sea change. I found it very, very hard to balance show business and being a dad. The narcissism of show business and the complete, total focus of it was very difficult.

I got really into surfing, and that was my life from when I was 10 years old to 18. I surfed almost every day, and it was all I cared about - I was a sand-in-the-bed, total beach bum.

I never want to hold myself up as the poster child of the successful mother-businesswoman. It's a total 'Gong Show.' I won't pretend. When you do so many things, something always suffers. You just can't be great at everything.

Maintaining pay parity is very important, and I am in total favour of it.

So, the total number of hours spent on the stuff you have to do to take care of a family, working and caring for stuff at home, the total number of hours is actually about the same for mothers and fathers.

I could never have gotten back into my career without the undying support of my husband, who works full time at a stressful job! We decided that we were going to do this as total partners and it is a 50/50 deal with us.

All I really care about is that I'm being honest and I'm real and I'm coming from a real place. There's a part of me that's a total cad and a part of me that's also a family man.

That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached.

I love Michel Roux, Jr., and James Martin - the chefs who are experts in their own right, like Rick Stein on fish. But I don't watch them very much because I don't think it's fair for my husband to be in a total food environment all the time! So we watch programmes about gardening more.

Success can be destructive to the creative process. I say it all the time: success is as dangerous as total failure.