My three years in Manhattan were sort of my university years. I was learning by myself, and it was a tough time. That's when I began writing articles for newspapers back home about life in New York. This interest took over, and I moved from painting to writing.

Nabokov can be almost too delicate at times, but in 'Lolita,' he puts his aristocratic sensitivity to use in such a dark tale that it creates this great tension between the story being told and the style that it's written in. And it's just amazing that one of the best novels in English was written by a Russian.

I'm the kind of writer who thinks style is just as important as the story being told.

For us Icelanders, the Sagas are like the Bible, only much better.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

Everyone without extraordinary research skills ought to be able to know what is happening inside the government, how it operates, where their tax dollars are going. Then they can make better decisions in the electoral process.

Honestly, acting is the most work when you're unemployed. For me, the actual acting part is never hard. It's the politics and basically everything around the acting that is difficult.

I'm Jewish; I'm not religious at all, and I wouldn't pretend to know anything about Catholic politics.