Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I like to be busy. I once shared an agent with the late Sir John Gielgud, who, at 96, was apparently still ringing up, saying, 'Hello, Gielgud here, any work?' Good on him. We've got to keep working. If we retire, there'll be nobody to play the old wrinklies, and that would be a dreadful shame.
When I started, I knew nothing about fashion. I remember, my first day going to my agency, I was wearing these huge bell-bottoms - they were patchwork corduroy and denim, which, at the time, I thought were amazing. My agent told me, 'You have a casting with Prada - you have to burn those jeans.'
I was in Vietnam, and I was exposed to Agent Orange. And there's a high relationship between people that were exposed to Agent Orange and the kind of lymphoma that I had. The prostate cancer was genetic in my family. My father had prostate cancer, my - three of my four uncles had prostate cancer.
I remember my agent at ICM at the beginning of my career telling me that I wasn't pretty enough, that I was always going to be a quirky sidekick. And he was an ogre of a man. He should have been carrying a torch. If he was in a bar, he couldn't have come near me, and then he was deciding my fate.
I heard about the project over a year before we began. My American agent said, 'Oh, you might want to read 'In Cold Blood' because they're talking about you for Capote, but the script's with Johnny Depp and Sean Penn at the moment.' So, these things take their time to dribble down the food chain.
Owen Wilson is an actor, but think of him as a sort of secret agent. He has an offbeat, indie-movie sensibility. Every so often, however, he infiltrates some big-budget movie he clearly doesn't belong in - 'Anaconda,' 'Armageddon,' 'The Haunting' - and struggles valiantly to stop it from sucking.
Every place you can find an edge, you should - the free agent market, the undrafted market, the D-League, international players, Americans playing overseas, international players playing in America, the second round. You should be looking for all those opportunities, finding whatever edge you can.
The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.
Of course I wanted an agent from the time I was like 5, but my mother was like, 'No, you're going to be normal, you're going to go to school, you're going to get good grades, you're going to play soccer, and if you do well, if you keep your grades up, you can do one community-theater show a year.'
My agent knows what I'm looking for. And I'm also looking for a new agent, too, so I'm putting it out there. Again, I'm not going to turn down every role, because there is no bad role, really. It's all what you bring to the role, but that traditional, 'Stand here and open a rope,' I'm not doing it.
'The Secret Agent' remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside. But 'Under Western Eyes' dares to leap inside - not only into the terrorist mind, but also into the troubled zone that divides West from East, 'the autocracy in mystic vestments.'
My husband wrote me love letters while I was on location in Canada and pregnant. They turned into being about food, and it turned it into a cookbook. He called it 'The Tuscan Cookbook for the Pregnant Male.' It was kind of genius. When I took it a book agent, he was like, 'Men don't buy cookbooks.'
If you want to be traditionally published, then you most likely want to get a literary agent. To sign with an agent, you need to send them a query letter, but agents can get up to 20,000 query letters a year. With numbers like that, it helps to get in front of agents with every opportunity you have.
I always write authors after I read their books. I've been doing it for years. I write a formal letter and send it to them in care of their agent. My mother always taught us to write thank you notes, and if an author puts themselves out there, they like to hear that their book connected with someone.
I was at a point where I couldn't find an agent or a manager, and I said, 'Okay, Lord. If this is what you have for me, I need you to work that. I need you to open doors.' I was at that point of truly surrendering whatever my will was, and, 'Lord, if this is what You want, You do it.' And, He did it.
We need to statutize what is permissible and what is not permissible. If a law enforcement agent uses a clearly unapproved technique like the knee that was on the neck of George Floyd for over eight minutes, no law enforcement agent thinks that that's right and that officer should be held accountable.
After I returned from Oxford, I spent 5-6 years in a village in Madhya Pradesh - 25 km. outside Bhopal - along with a group of people working with the communities. But, over time, we realised that there were just too many constraints, and for ordinary citizens to be the change agent was not that easy.
Annie Lee Moss was a black woman who worked for the Army as a code clerk in the Pentagon. She was identified by an undercover agent of the FBI as a member of the Communist Party. Moss denied it, the Democrats sprang to her defense, and she has been treated ever since as an innocent victim of McCarthy.
There's not just playing on a Saturday and you receiving your money at the end of the month. There's so, so much more to football than what people see. My agent told me when I was 15, 16, 'you can have all the ability in the world but if you're not mentally strong enough football will swallow you up.'
I realized that the actors that I liked and admired all went to drama school and got an agent that way. So I started when I was about 16 in drama school, and then I knew I had to wait until I was 18 so I could go on auditions, and I tried to get into one of the ones that I liked and then go from there.
The short story and the truth is that I was taking vocal lessons here in New York... One day, instead of my lesson, the piano player and I went into a studio... and we put down some demos... Those demos got to Quincy Jones through an agent... He listened to them, he called me, and we started to record.
Having an agent who had been through the process a million times and who could walk me through the process freed up a lot of mental space for me to just focus on the creative. I also worked with recipe testers, photographers, and assistants who were invaluable in creating a book that I'm truly proud of.
When I turned 18, my agent was like, 'You should change from Ricky to Rick.' So I thought it was a good idea. Rick never really fit. I tried for 18 years to make it work, and no one wanted to call me Rick. It should always have been Ricky. That's what it always should have been, so I'm going back to it.
I went to drama school and, after that, went to Paris to train at a place called Ecole Philippe Gaulier. When I came home, I realised I'd have to have a serious stab at it. I didn't have an agent and didn't have the traditional drama school showcase, so I started a comedy group with a couple of friends.
My agent says that I'm a 'repeat business guy.' If you hire me to come do a movie, I'll be on time, know all my material, be ready to go, have a good attitude. I'm here to work, so I get hired over and over again by the same producers. If you just be a team player on set you can work so much more often.
My advice for finding a literary agent would be first, put your work out there as much as possible and hopefully someone will find you, because I still have literary agents writing to me after they find my site. You want someone who understands your work and is going to be your cheerleader from day one.
Your agent should be invested in the success of your book past the contract stage. After all, if it sells well, she's going to be getting 15 percent of every dime you make. She can be your best advocate in fighting for your book - not just with editing and the cover, but with marketing and sales as well.
I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.
I'm in so many videos. There was a period of about two years where I danced for everyone: Kylie Minogue, Ed Sheeran, Jessie J, Taio Cruz. It got to the point where my fees were double the other girls', and I wouldn't even have to audition. They'd call my agent directly and say, 'We want twigs to come in.'
When I first started acting I was about nine years old. I had never been to audition in my life and my agent sent me out. It was just a commercial for 'Harry Potter.' That was the first thing I ever went out for and I got the 'Harry Potter' commercial which was really cool, but I didn't play Harry Potter.
I found an agent midway through my year-long run at 'Grease' and just started to audition. I fortunately booked 'South Pacific' six months after 'Grease' was over, and I feel like that was a huge turning point in legitimizing myself in the Broadway community, and getting to do that was absolutely amazing.
I went to university for a year, and I'm not one for schooling and have no enjoyment sitting in a classroom all day and ended up going to live in England for two years, just to travel. I worked in a bar in a hotel for a couple of years and had no intention of becoming an actor. That's where I met my agent.
My agent in Sweden used to send off interview tapes but I decided to take it upon myself and come to London to visit casting directors which is when things first started taking off for me. I love Sweden but the industry out here is quite small so when I was given the chance to go internationally I took it.
I did a film in Nairobi, Kenya called 'The Last Elephant,' with John Lithgow, Isabella Rosallini, and James Earl Jones. So I was in seventh heaven, alright? About a year later I get a call from my agent and he says they want to see you for this project called Candyman. I thought he was joking so I hung up.
Andrew Warren was a rarity in the CIA's Clandestine Service - African-American, fluent in Arabic, and relatively young for an agent who'd already spent nearly a decade chasing terrorists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria, so deep undercover that few of his friends or family knew the nature of his work.
Young actors ask me for advice. They say, 'Should I get an agent?' I tell them, 'Don't worry about that. Act, act, act. Get into that production of 'The Three Sisters' in a church basement. Consider every audition a chance to act, even if it's just for three minutes. Just do it whenever and wherever you can.'
As is well known, 'McCarthyism' was an alleged focus of political evil in the 1950s: Accusations of Communist taint, without factual basis; bogus lists of supposed Communists who never existed; failure in the end to produce even one provable Communist or Soviet agent, despite his myriad charges of subversion.
I had just come off my third consecutive failed television series. I had sworn off doing TV for a while. I was going to go to New York, sublet an apartment, and find my soul again. Before I got on the plane, my agent sent me the script for 'Psych.' I read it on the plane and realised it had a lot of potential.
As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I've never heard one say, 'No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.' They will always say, 'You don't like him? I've got somebody else.' They're totally spineless.
The qualities that make parties such a nightmare for people - and also so pleasurable - make them incredibly important inside of fiction. There's a chaos agent quality to them: You just don't know who's going to be there or why. You could run into an old enemy, an old friend, an old friend who's become an enemy.
Bent Literary Agency had a Q&A on Twitter, and I took a chance and asked if the Black Lives Matter movement was an appropriate topic for a YA novel. Brooks Sherman, who is now my agent, responded that he didn't think any topics were inappropriate for YA. I remember being so terrified even just sending the tweet.
When good things come in, my agent calls or sends me the script. But I allow them to sort through the offers so that I am not just sitting and reading everything because honestly, sometimes the scripts that appeal to me are projects that are not good projects, but I just really like the script or the characters.
I live in New York and got a call from my agent saying there was this new role on 'Mad Men,' it might be recurring and they're seeing people tomorrow. I said, 'OK, this is one of those things where you hedge your bets, use your miles and get on a plane.' I flew out Tuesday morning and got the job on a Wednesday.
So I did 'Celebrity Big Brother' and while I was locked in a house with crazy people I came out and Denise had actually gone to my agency and got with my agent. And my agent told me, hes like, 'Yeah, I have Denise Richards. That's so exciting, right?' I go, 'So basically you hired my competition. That's amazing.'
I actually did an Agatha Christie monologue for my audition showcase at Guildhall, and that's how I got my agent. Some people said 'ooh it's old hat' and 'too risky'. Some people think she's all about the narrative and thriller aspect at the expense of character and I disagree. I did it anyway and it worked well.
Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.
Nobody told me there was any idea for a sequel to 'The Exorcist.' But my agent called me to tell me they were going to do it, and there was a part for me. I said, 'But I died in the first film.' 'Well,' he told me, 'this is from the early days of Father Merrin's life.' I told him I just didn't want to do it again.
My agent asked if I fancied Robin Hood and I thought: 'Yeah, why not?' I hadn't watched it, to be honest, but I'd seen bits and knew it was really popular Saturday family viewing with heaps of action. I thought it would be great fun. I was up for a good old play-fighting and the scripts were terrifically exciting.
By comparison, 'The Secret Agent' is not especially prescient about terrorism, certainly not technically. The Professor was a stock figure of Edwardian fiction, and his dreams of mass destruction were nothing ahead of their time. Many novels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved plots far more deadly.
I was being rejected all the time. Agents would say, 'I don't think you're the type they're looking for.' I was always like, 'You think? I don't want you to think. I want them to think that.' This business is all about someone's opinion, but not the agent or the manager's. How do they know? They're not that person.