Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was miserable in West Side Story. They really miscast me. I came from the Midwest; what they really needed was a guy that was street smart. The first time I saw the movie, I had to walk out. I looked like the biggest fruit that ever walked on to film. My character was so weak.
What led me to that was I have never - I mean, I watch movies and I don't care who is the protagonist. I feel what that guy is feeling. You know, if it's Tom Cruise leaping over a building - I want to make it, you know? And I'm going to - yes, I made it. And yeah, so I get that.
Growing up, politics never trickled down to the areas we come from. But people from Obama's camp, and Obama himself, reached out to me and asked for my help on the campaign. We've sat and had dinner, and we've spoken on the phone. He's a very sharp guy. Very charming. Very cool.
The other thing is that I'm a pretty moody guy, but no one really wants to see a normal-looking guy complain about things or talk about being unhappy. That's hard. Most people are like, 'Well, you have all your hair and you're tall, so why are you unhappy?' That can be limiting.
When I first started, it was a dare. Someone basically said, 'You're a tough guy... but I'll bet you won't get on a microphone in front of a bunch of people.' I was terrified, but I did it. Once I broke the ice and got onstage and got some laughs, I thought, 'That's not so bad.'
You're not very good at being contemplative," Milo said. "You always sound like some bad caricature of a philosopher, like those fortune cookies with 'Confucius say' or the Nietzsche guy from Mystery Men that's always saying 'when you walk on the ground, the ground walks on you.
I like to be able to control which players I'm working with. Because it doesn't matter how good a coach you are if the guys you're working with think they already know it all. You need a response, you need to feel they're trying. I want players who are always striving to improve.
You do a movie [where] you like the script [and] it has something to say that you care about. And there are certain people in this industry that you kind of stick with. Guys like [“The Congressman” producer] Fred Roos. They call you, and if you’re not working, that’s what you do.
I have ideas every day, and if I'm not carrying a pad of paper, I'm typing it into the notes thing on my iPhone, and it's just ridiculous - idle hands are the devil's plaything, and I can't be the devil's plaything. I got to be the devil; I got to be the guy making it all happen.
I'm more of an oldies guy. I'll say this - Michael Jackson, best entertainer of all time. Luther Vandross, best male singer of all time. Whitney Houston, best female singer of all time...and when Teddy Pendergrass says turn off the lights, turn 'em off. That's what I got for you.
George Carlin is kind of my template now because George Carlin before was straight laced regular comic and he had short hair, a tie, suit, nightclub guy. Then he said screw it, let his hair grow, just started telling what he thought was the truth. So that's what I'm trying to do.
The consequences for failure are very different if you're a woman or a person of color than they are if you're a guy. If you're a guy who makes a mistake, you get a second chance. Often, for those of us who are outsiders, we make a mistake, and that's the end of the conversation.
The name Derek Jeter is made for stardom. He's got an infectious smile, and he's so handsome and well-behaved. He's just a fine young man who does everything right. He's like Jack Armstrong and Frank Merriwell, guys I grew up rooting for. Some guys come along who just measure up.
It's kind of like those little electric bumper cars where you drive around and see if you can hit the other guy. That's exactly what the country is like now. You no longer have the sense of community. Of loyalty. It's lost its sense of group. It has nothing to do with leadership.
The guy, Magic Johnson, built a business empire and you don't do that just because you have a pretty smile. The guy is definitely a smart guy, knows what he's doing. He's a basketball genius. So to downplay that and disrespect that, I thought it was stereotyping him way too much.
You have to find the line between working hard and being a workaholic. I know a lot of those bigger-name guys are workaholics, and I don't know if I want to go that far. One day I would like to have a relationship and a normal social life, so it's all about striking that balance.
I feel pain everywhere. A lot of guys in chairs do feel their legs. But if you don't, there's a thing called disreflex, so you know if something happens, say, you can't feel your foot or your leg and your body reacts. You know something's not right and you survey what's going on.
One of the best compliments I ever got was "You know what I like about you? You're smart enough to be scared. So many guys come on cocky, they don't want to go over their stuff, they don't want to do a pre-interview. You're always smart enough to be worried till the last minute."
I was looking to do a comedy and found a group of guys that were really supportive of my interests in it, though it was a little outside of my wheel house. Strangely, I visited the set of Knocked Up and met Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] and Judd[Apatow] and Shauna [Robertson].
Randy Edsall is a good, strong, decent man who is working his tail off on behalf of the University of Maryland. And there are more people that want to spend their days burning things down than building it up. At least just stop rooting against him. You know, give the guy a chance.
I'm a pretty laid-back kind of guy. What I've always wanted to do is set up situations in our company where if people who worked there needed help, we would try to help them, and at the same token if the company needed help from people, they would help us. A kind of give and take.
There are billions of men in the world, probably millions near my age. Maybe hundreds who are compatible with me. Maybe at least a dozen who would want to date me. There's got to be at least five on the continent whom I could probably marry. So why am I so hung up on this one guy?
I'm always looking for a chance to do something different. I don't necessarily want to repeat myself, at any time, and I don't want to just do the same guy, over and over and over again. I want to be able to do different things and to evolve and constantly try to find those roles.
The show definitely has a romantic construct, and that's a genre that I've never had access to, in a significant way. This interesting for me to see, as an Asian guy, just standing back. I just wanted to break my way into a different genre. I was tickled that it was offered to me.
I remember when we did our first read-through, Sonny [Bono] looks at the script and he goes, "Okay, I'll see you guys later. Chai-ay-oh!" And I said, "It's ciao! Aren't you Italian? C-i-a-o doesn't spell 'chai-ay-oh.'" Sonny's dead, so he won't be embarrassed if I tell that story.
Tumblr has a big community of bears and bear chasers. All my favorites on Tumblr and all the fan mail I get is all like, "We want to tickle you! What size shoe are you?" They're all like really big, heavyset, bearded guys who are like, "I want to ride your face like a motorcycle!"
Bill Withers, Van Morrison and Marvin Gaye are pioneers in popular music for the last century, and these are people who have influenced me as well, so it's pretty flattering. I've got a long way to go to reach anywhere near what those guys have done. But it's a good encouragement.
Whatever it is that's bothering me - interacting with annoying guy at a restaurant, contemplating my age, or losing friends to illness - I'll start to chip away at it. If you can poke holes in it, it's not as formidable; it's not as scary, and ultimately, it becomes another truth.
I think working with Johnny Depp was very intimidating. It was my fault though. I mean he's a total cool nice, nice guy, but I was just so, I don't know, overpowered by his presence. Like he's a very mystic person. He's older so I never really warmed up around him. I was so stiff.
When I was young, I read the Bible, and I already knew what it meant to be the good guy - and look what happened to Jesus. So, I already understood that you get ridiculed for telling the truth, and I've always been aware of that. But, I'm a guy with confidence, and I'm not afraid.
A lot of shows where I'm playing a senator or a congressman or a doctor or a high-priced attorney, I do a number on myself. "I am a powerful attorney, or a doctor." It's a little convincing job I do on myself first to know I can walk out on the set and know that I can be this guy.
Everyone knows drones are being deployed outside the US for assassinations. Let's say you even believe in drones. Shouldn't we have a system that would "justify" their use? i.e. we did this attack, because these bad guys were there, and here's what we did. We don't even have that.
Show me one guy or woman as funny as Rodney Dangerfield or as good as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, or Joan Rivers. There are a lot of good comics out there, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics.
If you were a new guy at ILM, they put you on the night crew - my shift was from 7 P.M. to about 5 A.M. In my free time, I was working on an idea with my older brother, a software engineer getting his doctorate at the University of Michigan. Ultimately, it developed into Photoshop.
I think what people were trying with me was to figure out who I was. They thought I was funny, but they were like, "How can we use this guy so he can regularly do this?" Does that make any sense? I think people were trying to figure out if my fat peg would fit in their square hole.
On `Earth Song' I was the military guy that would come out of a tank that was used during the show. It was unbelievable; somehow I'd become a Michael Jackson fan that got to dance with Michael Jackson! I spent a lot of time wondering, "what the hell did I do right to deserve this?"
If you're a guy, you should get girls flowers all the time. They never get old and you can never get them enough. I'm never disappointed when I get flowers. I always thought guys who don't buy women flowers are such fools. All it takes is one. A little goes a long way with flowers.
The company I invested in is probably a leader in that area. They're a company called Second Spectrum, which happens to be based in LA but was started by two USC computer-science professors. It's filled with guys who love sports, who played sports, but really look like programmers.
There's a tendency on the part of Americans, all of us, to say, 'Hey, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone, we don't have to worry about these guys again.' We always have to be worried about them, we always have to be concerned about them, and we have to be well-informed.
Seve Ballesteros was the best trouble-shot player who ever lived. It didn't matter how far in the woods you put that guy, he'd find a way to get out. But Seve inadvertently put a lot of big numbers on the scorecards of average players, because he inspired them to take dumb chances.
If my edge is dull, my sword is dull, and I don't want to fight another guy whose sword is dull. If you've got two steel swords going back and forth hitting each other, what's gonna happen? Both of them are going to get sharper. Everybody that's in the industry has lost their edge.
When I used to do the action scenes, I would have to play it rough. If you hit an actress accidentally, she would usually take it on the chin and say, `Don't do that again.' But with the guys, they would put ice on it, take a 20-minute break and ask for x-rays. It was unbelievable.
I used to fly around quite a bit, you know? I took a lot of unnecessary chances on the highways. And I started racing, and now I drive on the highways, I'm extra cautious because no one knows what they're doing half the time. You don't know what this guy is going to do or that one.
Like I say, if [Barack] Obama really, really wanted to use the law to stop acts of militant terrorism, he would get hold of the architects of Sharia, as the American president, and he'd say, "You know, you guys, you're gonna have to moderate this. This is not good. It's not right."
This [U.S.] bombing in Libya. So what are we doing in Libya? We just dropped some bombs on someone who we found is a leader there, maybe we killed some group attending a leadership meeting. Does this mean the problem is going to go away? No. It means we're going to have worse guys.
The guy we want to get is the guy who did the Aerosmith album which is coming out in two days, and a Chili Peppers album, and a couple of Pearl Jam albums. We want to get someone that will sort of bring out the high energy aspect more than the dreaminess that was on the last album.
We were all inspired by him as an actor and his iconography and thought, if we get somebody like Laurence Fishburne, we can tell a much more sophisticated, complicated version of Jack Crawford than we'd seen before as this large and in-charge and in-control guy, who is unflappable.
The Comedy Store - all three rooms were filled with 800 people in the room. And during that time, all these guys and some women, but mostly guys who weren't funny were doing stand up for a living; they weren't accountants, they were making $30-$50 grand a year on the road, or more.
I'm not a detail guy. I depend on accountants and administrators to do my detail stuff for me, but I do know the overall picture and I know that if you put business people together in a room, not just politicians, they could shrink the deficit tremendously by good business tactics.
Some of you guys are sitting down, some of you guys are standing up. But if you really take a moment and you go inside your body, you can feel your weight against the earth, and you can recognize that you're the only person who's feeling your own weight against the earth right now.