Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
'The Danish Girl' was published in 2000. Then it, too, would disappear, as most books do. It fell out of print almost everywhere. I wrote other books and, as an editor, worked on dozens more. Yet always, Lili stayed with me.
'Selfie' is the word du jour, and it became cause celebre at Nelson Mandela's funeral when the Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt took a selfie with U.S. President Barack Obama and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron.
I have also been saddened, though hardly surprised, by the weakness of the EU's reaction to the criminal attack on the Danish embassy in Syria, which seems to have been permitted, if not actively encouraged, by the Syrian regime.
I shot a Metallica video in Hollywood, and there were, like, 100 people on set. There was even a guy there to put antiseptic gel on my hands. Amazing. If I asked for that on a Danish set, they'd probably kick me out of the country.
I've never played a Dane in a movie. I've had offers to be in Danish movies, including for some good directors, but I either had a job at the time or, when I was available, the movie just didn't happen. Hopefully someday I'll do one.
There's a Danish architecture firm called BIG. I love architecture, and I always check out their work; they're very good at reimagining the way we live. They put the human experience as the focus, with access to air and outdoor space.
Personally, I am a nationalist, but my race is my nation, and I see all true Europeans as my racial brethren and part of my nation, be them Norwegian, Danish, or Swedish, French, German, or English, Russian, Polish, or Belorussian, or whatever.
I do love my full English breakfast, but not every day. What I can't do without first thing in the morning, though, is my Danish pastry or a croissant - anything with a laminated dough, enriched with butter to make it beautifully golden and flaky.
There are, of course, always painters whom I admire and find fascinating. I've often thought, 'Goodness, if I could paint like the Danish Golden Age painters, the early 19th century painters, the way they could paint a landscape - absolutely beautiful.'
That's a lovely starting point for me as an actor: the question of what will we - or can we - do with this lot of years with which we're blessed? More than my other films, 'The Danish Girl' is about the gigantic risks involved in being true to one's self.
In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 'The Passion of Joan of Arc,' one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once.
I remember dawn coming up over the Strait of Malacca; ragamuffin kids on the dock in Sumatra laughing as they pelted us with bananas; collecting dead flying fish off the deck and bringing them to our sweet, fat, toothless Danish cook to fry up for breakfast.
Ah, Scotland. I am three-parts Scottish and terribly proud of it, although maybe we should divide it into eighths, because my two-eighths are Danish and English, the Lumley part. But the bulk of the rest of me is Scottish - and Scottish ministers especially.
I was raised speaking English and Spanish. And I also speak Danish. And I can get by in French and Italian. I've acted in Spanish and English, but when something has to do with emotions, sometimes I feel I can get to the heart of the matter better in Spanish.
With millions of family wage manufacturing jobs lost since 2001, we need an energy bill that takes bold action to tap into American ingenuity in order to lead the world in new clean energy technology, rather than playing catch-up to the Japanese, Danish, and Germans.
I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.
When my career in hotels was taking off in the Nineties, I went to work as a head baker in Cyprus, where I was making Danish pastries every day. I can remember that the head chef was always on my back to put more seasonal fruits in with the creme patissiere. I'd even make them with rhubarb.
Every day of my adult life, I have worn at least one piece of jewelry from my maternal grandmother's collection, all of which were manufactured by famed Danish silversmith Georg Jensen. To the naked eye, I am either a Jensen loyalist or a grandmother loyalist. Really I am just a Pretty Things loyalist.
A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.
I was watching the Danish version of 'The Killing' when I got the audition for 'The Fall,' and I loved it; it was so original. I approached 'The Fall' with that in mind. I'd no problem with the violence - it was very clear from the script how horrifying the crimes were and that had to be shown, without going to extremes.
As a person of color, I was trained from very early on to see 'Leave It to Beaver,' 'Gilligan's Island,' or 'Hamlet' and look beyond the specifics of it - whether it be silly white people on an island or a family living in Nowheres or a Danish person - to leap past the specifics and find the human truths that have to do with me.
This is the question I'm asking: Do Americans live twice as long because they consume twice as much energy as Europeans? Are you people twice as smart as the average Frenchman? Do you enjoy life twice as much as the average Danish guy? What have we gotten for consuming twice as much energy as Europe? What have we gotten in return?
Usually, when you get early versions of scripts, they are not very good. I found 'Borgen' amazing from the very first read-through because of how fast-paced and gripping it was. It felt more international because of the way it didn't dwell on the characters' personal lives as many Danish shows used to, but still, nobody thought it would travel.
