What inspires you to learn?

The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.

Knowledge is good for life. Life is what you play off for acting.

I don't ever want to stop learning. And I really want to learn French fluently.

they did what good teachers are meant to do, which is inspire you to love literature.

Taoism gave me a handle on how to look at life and how to lead it when I was an adolescent hunting for ways to make sense of the world without going off into the God business. Returning to Lao-tzu throughout the years, I’ve always found—and find—him offering what I want or need to learn.

I feel myself still like a student learning many things doing films.

I try to be a Sherlock Holmes of botany. It's not enough to enjoy plants – I want to know why they are wilting, to work things out.

I still regularly read New Scientist to try to keep up with quantum theory and cosmological discoveries and so forth. And I read National Geographic—that’s not a plug.

Even though I have a highly visual imagination, I’ve had to learn just how much can be said onscreen without a word, and David and Steve have taught me that.

I’m curious. Period. I find everything interesting. Real life. Fake life. Objects. Flowers. Cats. But mostly people. If you keep your eyes open and your mind open, everything can be interesting. The secret is that there is no secret.

I’m reading an odd collection of books that should not go together, but of course they do. Georgina Kleege: What Blindness Brings To Art; Fred Moten: Black and Blur; Theri Pickens: Black Madness :: Mad Blackness.

really watching a lot of work. Also finding the right people to associate with and learn from in terms of work.

To me, part of what I love about puzzles is that they fuel my curiosity and I’d say curiosity and gratitude are my two favorite virtues. My last book was about gratitude; this book is all about curiosity. Curiosity is what drives puzzlers. They’re like, ‘Why is it? What is it?’

Probably something else I learned at art school, which is the ability to make something from very little using your own imagination. That’s the building block of my career.

I’m in a transition, Hans. I am painting, and I am painting over and then painting, and then painting over, and destroying, and painting, and destroying, and painting over. I am just trying to find the next thing, and the only way I think I can find it is to keep doing things and learning from it.

I love being bad at something and getting better at it.