I love 'Donnie Brasco' and 'Days of Thunder,' so after I did 'The Skulls,' I was like, 'I want to be either an undercover cop, or I want to race cars!' Universal came to me with a newspaper article about street racing in L.A., and I was like, 'Are you kidding me? I grew up doing that right off Peoria in Sun Valley.' They asked if I wanted to do it.

I fell in love with the ocean when I was just a little kid, four or five years old, I was a junior ranger, I was going out and doing intertidal stuff, walking around and sticking my finger in my first sea anemone and picking up starfish and all that. It gripped me when I was young.

One game that drives me crazy, is when a guy gives the girl they really like more attention, and then they feel like maybe they pressed too hard, so they back way off and start giving other women attention. I've never pulled this myself.

The mornings along the coast where the fog and mist meet with the salty spray of the seas is one of my favourite smells. I love the smell in the evergreen forest just after it rains - The Redwood Forest in California has the coast, too, so you have the best of everything!

I'm a pretty agile guy, especially being taller and having done martial arts from about the age of 13, but parkour is one of those sports that I wish I'd discovered sooner. When my nephew first showed me, I thought, 'Damn - I'm too old for this.'

Thing is, I went to a born-again Christian high school, was brought up in a traditional Mormon family where these ideas about parenting are of structure and sacrifice. To think outside of that idea of family and parenting that I've grown up with is tough but also very freeing.

I remember when I first came around, the computer-generated stuff was pretty wicked. I was like, 'Wow!' but I feel like then for the longest time, we saw so much of it, after a while, you might as well just be watching an animated movie.

I think that just sitting down and having casual conversation is the hardest stuff to do. But the extremes? I know what it feels like to come racing around the corner at 90 miles an hour, sliding the car sideways. I know what gear I'm hitting it in when I'm coming around the corner and where I need to downshift. So to me, that's the fun stuff.

Surfing big waves is not an extreme sport to me. I fall off, tumble down, and come up. My heart's racing because I'm thinking I almost drowned, and I thank God I can breathe again, but I always think, 'What am I hitting?' Water.

Sometimes the hurdles aren't really hurdles at all. They're welcome challenges, tests.

Page 3 is a crazy concept whereby for no discernable reason, a national newspaper prints a photograph of a young woman showing her tits. I'd object but I'm too enamoured with the boobs...

In spite of the anguish my addiction to drugs and alcohol has caused me, I wouldn’t relinquish its lessons

My modus operandi is that I'll be content with anything, as long as I know that it's the best that's possible.

I love it when I meet a woman and her sexuality is dancing across her face, so it’s apparent that all we need to do is nod and find a cupboard.†

I deplore those long brown curly fingernail folk. I don’t even especially like people who have one long thumbnail for guitar. My mate Karl has one, and it scratched me the other day. I was sickened.

When people are content they are difficult to manoeuvre. We are perennially discontent and offered placebos as remedies.

We thought it was nice of you to let him have a go, because, in England, he wouldn't be trusted with a pair of scissors.

This is why people get obsessed with festivals, or clubs, or drugs, or football, or other temporal approximations of togetherness; these distilled vials of the elixir are craved by our starved souls.

Mark Twain, the thinking man’s Colonel Sanders, reputedly said, “America is New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Everywhere else is Cleveland.

Companies' motives to make profit means they neglect inherent social or moral values.

We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue our petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial desires.

I was already a weary connoisseur of my dad’s pornography and had begun to develop my almost supernatural ability for guessing women’s bra sizes.

We are imprisoned within, hypnotized without, denying ourselves access to the internal peace and external harmony. Can we execute the perfect jailbreak when we have become our own jailers?

I recognize that I have the ability to be selfish, but I also recognize that you can't be happy if you only care about yourself at the expense of other people.