Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Whether it's animated, whether it's live-action, whether it's Broadway, whether it's television, a musical is a musical is a musical. So, pretty much you approach the songs in pretty much the same way. The difference might be that in a film you have a close up. On stage you don't. So there are more songs on the stage because the songs are kind of the close up.
You gotta have friends, and it's really hard to have friends that don't operate on the same schedule as you or do the same kind of things you do, because they don't understand it. And then you realize that your friends - your real-life friends - it's not that they become fanboys of you but they become more interested in what you're doing than how you're doing.
I'm really sensitive to the beginning of a motif or a phrase or something that's kind of the backbone or becomes kind of the spine that you grow muscle tissue onto. You know from that, if you have that good beginning, it's like everything that grows off it often has potential. Maybe I'm good at that early bit of recognition of pieces of potential. I'm not sure.
I think that G-O-D is like the answer to a formula for creating life. Or some kind of energy or antigravity. It's like the answer to an equation and it's become mythical over the years. But at one time we all knew what it was. I don't know when it was exactly, but that was the ancient knowledge. It's become diffused as it was handed down and turned into myth.
I really can't claim ever to have had an exceptionally close relationship with a minister. I'm always there. I pay my pledge. I listen and observe with interest. I'm very sympathetic with the rigor and the aesthetic quality of what they do. Aside from that, I don't have a kind of personal experience with any of them that I could consider privileged, so to speak.
I'm emotionally invested in every movie that I do, period, because you've got to make that commitment. You're spending a year, 18 months of your life doing it. I'm invested in all those kinds of pieces. Most of the films I've had in my career have never tested well. I got lucky that sometimes I got supported by studios - or, at least if not supported, tolerated.
The traditional farm, the peanuts, the cotton, the corn, is probably not the thing to do, because you're up against big farmers who can afford all the equipment to grow those kinds of crops. But we need healthy food. We're being encouraged to eat more vegetables. Our school systems are being encouraged to buy locally. So, we need farmers who can produce that food.
I love bad comedy more than I love good comedy, so I love open mics. Or I used to. But the thing that delights me more than anything else in an open-mic performer is when the comic has one joke that requires some kind of prop. But only one. The prop is always produced very awkwardly, and it never, ever pays off. The resulting embarrassment is savory and delicious.
Michael Vick is a work in progress. I think he really is wanting to do the right thing. I think the Philadelphia Eagles have been a great organization for him. He's had some ups and downs. He still has to learn to not put himself in, maybe bad situations, in terms of personal life and friends, and that kind of thing. But all in all, I think he's growing every day.
There's a lot of debate on this subject - about what kind of car handles best. Some say a a front-engined car, some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind.
The biggest thing that I don't like about L.A. is the sort of 2 a.m. shutdown of everything. It really kind of stagnates the nightlife. It's very hard to casually have fun in Los Angeles. If you want to go out and have fun it's like a full-time job, you have to really prepare, and call ahead, and get on a list, and know somebody... It's really rough to relax here.
I actually found out about Ugg on a trip to Australia, which I guess is where they were born themselves. Everyone was wearing them there, kind of slightly ahead of when they caught on globally. This was in 2002 or so. Just after I left sixth form I was modeling and my best mate was Australian so I went over there to visit her. That was my introduction to the brand.
To me the sort of like, the ethos, if you will, of like tabloid is like Daily News in the 1970s. It's a news organization that thinks of its mission to speak directly to people who are kind of , the people who are sort of the foundation of the American workforce or were at one time. What I love about this conception of the tabloid is that actually everybody read it.
They always assumed that I did not speak. That I could not. So many had plotted my death, discussed it, laughed about it, even while I was in the same room, because they assumed I was mindless. Like one of the failures of their kind, born mad. But I was not a failure. I was what I was supposed to be. I was dhampir. And they never lived to tell anyone they were wrong.
I had a question asked of me the other day, and this is asked of me a lot, surprisingly. 'Is there anything you want that you can't have?' And I said, 'Of course! What kind of question is this? Of course there is.' There's any number of things that I would like to have that I either can't afford or it doesn't make sense to buy. You know, I'd love to have world peace.
If you look around at the news industry, there are more and more sites clamoring for that kind of writing, whether it's an Ideas section or personal essay series or longform. Readers are hungry for it. It's like prestige TV, though; it's execution-dependent. You have to figure out the right advertiser or sponsor, and you have to deliver, you can't just feed the beast.
Look at the history of the printing press, when this was invented what sort of consequences this had. Or industrialization, what sort of consequences that had. Very often, it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies. And it took awhile until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and manage and steer this.
Americans don't want to hear the answers are privileged and off limits or they can't be provided in public or it would be inappropriate for witnesses to tell us what they know. We are talking about an attack on our democratic institutions and stonewalling of any kind is unacceptable. General Jeff Sessions acknowledged that there is no legal basis for this stonewalling.
I think people kind of come up and go, "Why hasn't that person busted out?" Almost always at the end of career, what you find out is that either consciously or subconsciously success hasn't happened because that person hasn't chosen for it to happen. Either through walking away because it wasn't the life they wanted or through self-sabotaging because they weren't ready.
For me, the tabletop is an easy way to eliminate the possibilities of chords, modes, melodies, and harmonies. It kind of confines you to this other sound sphere. I know anyone facing this kind of dilemma could always just find another instrument more suitable to their needs, such as a sampler or synthesizer, but I figured I have a guitar and amp so why not just use them?
I feel like a lot of the films I do, part of the reason I like doing them is I'm not 100 percent sure what it's going to be. It's exciting. I read an equal amount of very generic scripts, and you kind of know exactly what those are and that doesn't whet my appetite. I already know what it is or I already know what the character is. It's just a lot harder to get interested.
Independent films will probably kill themselves off by virtue of their own success. With a crossover hit like PULP FICTION, the criteria by which art-house movies are produced and marketed and exploited have changed. With studio money and overheads and budgets and deal-making machinery, a certain kind of narrative structure and popcorn-type payoff start infusing themselves.
I got sent off to my grandmother's for five months and watched a lot of TV and had a lot of grilled cheese with butter on it - because she was English and put lots of butter on everything - and yogurt. The English are big on dairy products, you know? I'd have an earache, and she'd be like, "Here, have some milk." Wonderful woman, but she had kind of screwed-up nutrition ideas.
The tremendous Jeremy Latcham from Marvel showed up with this one-of-a-kind animated encyclopedia about S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Avengers. Coulson wasn't a part of the comic books, which is a singular thing about him that I thought would get me killed off very quickly, but luckily, it didn't. It just became a thing that I fit into, and they kept finding new and better uses for me.
I think it's a legend that Lars von Trier is such a tough person to work with. I really didn't experience any of that. Of course, he's difficult in the sense that what he asks for is difficult. For my part in Antichrist, I suffered a bit. But it was the part - it wasn't him. He wasn't cruel. On the contrary, he was very kind. You know what you're up for when you read the pitch.
When I first came to New York, in the '70s, artists were certainly divided about the Andy Warhol persona, and about the work. I thought it was utterly cool - I thought the Factory was utterly glamorous - but there were a lot of artists I really admired and respected who were older that kind of dismissed it, couldn't get it, and felt that there was a lack of seriousness about it.
What I like is horror movies, including '80s slasher movies that politically I have all kinds of problems with. Which is an interesting balance, because I have this leftist puritan strain that, well, if you like something that goes against your politics, maybe you should train yourself not to like it. But I know that I like horror movies and that's what I watch when I get a moment.
I found when we released Not Your Kind of People it was hard for me to go back on tour, especially when we had some runs that were 7 or 8 weeks in a row and I wouldn't see my family the whole time. It has gotten easier with the internet you know because you can Skype or get on Facetime and connect with your family. It was much harder to do that when we started Garbage 20 years ago.
A lot of the Russian economy is built around people who are one way or another milking the state and taking money from the state and recycling it into their private bank accounts. And there are a lot of people who are taking advantage of that, so it's not just one person. It's a kind of web of people doing that, and that's how the system stays in power and how people stay in control.
Will it/won't it be back kind of game is never fun but I've been doing it for over 10 years and it's the name of the game really. As an actress, you never know what next year's going to bring, whether you're doing films or seasons for TV. It's just the way it is. You can let it drive you crazy, or you cannot. I choose not to let it bother me too much and just always hope for the best.
Anyone who does investigative journalism is not in it for the money. Investigative journalism by nature is the most work intensive kind of journalism you can take on. That's why you see less and less investigative journalism at newspapers and magazines. No matter what you're paid for it, you put in so many man-hours it's one of the least lucrative aspects of journalism you can take on.
I was really kind of miserable with myself personally and all of the things that you can be creatively, until someone said - and I don't know what about it made it click at this specific time - but they said, "You're not 18 anymore, and you're not writing songs in your old bedroom. It's work. You should get up every day and set a perimeter of time and start compartmentalizing your life."
I'm allergic to over-promising. I'm allergic to exaggeration, because I've been in schools for a large part of my life, and I still go to schools. What I want is realistic, evidence-based kinds of things that know the history of efforts to individualize instruction and why they flop before, so you can have a much smarter approach to reforming schools, to improve what goes on in classrooms.
I seem to thrive by destroying the last thing I did, in a kind of cartoon Nietzsche way. Emerson says in "Experience" something like "every ultimate fact soon becomes the next in a series." The self feels more real when you are destroying things you've made than when you are paying them homage. That's the good news about being self-destructive. The bad news, I feel I don't need to deliver.
When you make your first film, it's really hard in some ways. You're just nowhere. But then you have something. If you have a success, then you might be looking to take a fall. If you had a fall, you get a certain kind of euphoria because you're not dead, so you can still do it again. It's about how you go through the processes. Do you enjoy that "doing"? Is it getting less fun or more fun?
It's kind of ironic that when you look at the evidence of intelligence and so on, a lot of it is anecdotal. A lot of it is, "Well, we saw this dolphin do this extraordinary thing," or, "We screwed up with our apparatus, and then the dolphins did this." And so it seems to me that the more we can actually watch them doing their thing, the better chance we'll have of making some sense of them.
I think if you could remove all of the baggage - all of the ideology, the history, whatever else - and look in purely geostrategic terms, I think it's hard to figure out why the US and Iran would necessarily be in conflict. In fact during the shah's era, before 1979 - recognizing that there were all kinds of other problems - the US and Iran worked together splendidly at the strategic level.
I wouldn't want to be so presumptuous as to suggest what my neighbors should or shouldn't do. Great insights might come out of drug dealing and prostitution. I'm not qualified to say. Not that I would promote those practices. I just respect the complexity of their cultural ecosystem and think it would be pretty lame, not to mention fruitless, to waltz in with some kind of reformative agenda.
I love the U.S. We came the first time in 2003, and it seems like we haven't left since. James Iha from The Smashing Pumpkins came to Stockholm to see one of our shows, and he really fell in love with the band. He said, "I'm going to take you to America, I'm going to release you on my label." When you're in your early twenties and you get that kind of opportunity, you just gotta roll with it.
Failure's relative. I've always felt, even early on, if I lose the freedom to fail, something's not right about that. It's how you treat failure, too. There's something to learn from it. I've had movies that have failed colossally, so you kind of analyze your failures: What kind of failure was it? A failure because it's misunderstood by others? A failure because you misunderstood it yourself?
I like to direct movies, but I don't like to goof around for eight years talking about it. And it's pretty irritating to get a movie on. So to complicate it by having more irritation as a director, I don't really need it. And because I direct a great deal still, but in the theater, I kind of get that anyway. Which is not at all to say I would never do it again, or it would never happen again.
This is not a movie about smelling the urine! It's another kind of movie." Volker Schlöndorff got Billy Wilder to agree to these conversations - you can buy it - because Volker spoke German at times. And he said to Billy Wilder: "What is in your mind?" And he said: "If you're going to try to tell the truth to the audience, you'd better be funny or they'll kill you." And I haven't forgotten that.
One of the great things about the longer you do a character, the more the writers start to understand your kind of character ticks and things that you like to do. The most exciting thing I think for a writer is when the characters just start speaking for themselves. You sit down at your keyboard and just stuff starts jumping out of their mouths. They just sort of wrote the scripts for themselves.
The switch has been built. Maybe you trust Barack Obama not to throw that switch, and maybe you trust George Bush not to throw that switch, but as we look towards the future, we see inequality becoming more and more acute. We're seeing more and more protests against cops and this kind of thing. We're also seeing more and more natural disasters. We're seeing more and more environmental insecurity.
With a director it's all about the work; I'd work with a great director over - you know, I'm not the kind of actor who that doesn't go, 'I want to play this role.' It's more like, 'I want to work with this director,' regardless of what the role is because if it's a good director, you'll probably find a good role because it's a decent film. But a mediocre director will always make a mediocre movie.
You don't just find an empty museum and say, "I should do something here." I was looking for another kind of venue or exhibition format. I was trying to find a site where something could happen over a long period of time - something that could slowly transform itself and the place as it went. And I was also trying to stand out of the art-world system. Strangely enough, I stumbled on vacant museum.
Syria is descending into suicide. It's a horror story and getting worse and worse. There's no bright spot on the horizon. What will probably happen, if this continues, is that Syria will be partitioned into probably three regions; a Kurdish region - which is already forming - that could pull out and join in some fashion the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, maybe with some kind of deal with Turkey.
There's no way you can grow an economy with that, with that many people not working and not paying taxes, you can have any kind of government solvency, you can't have any kind of growing economy, which is exactly what the Democrats want, by the way. Much better for the Democrats that you don't work. The more you work, the less dependent on them you are. If this sounds hideous, I'm sorry, it's true.
Almost everything I do when I approach an operational problem comes from the time I've been in space. It's a way of organizing your thoughts. We use problem-solving; what we call "what-if-ing." What if this happened? What would we do? We go over plan B, C, D, E, F, and whatever else, depending on the criticality of what we're doing. This kind of thing can be applied almost everywhere, even at home.
I kind of dropped a lot of bad habits about three years ago and became kind of accidentally straight-edge. I don't have Xs on my hands, but I guess if I wanted to go back to calling myself straight-edge, I could. Around that same time I started running. I never saw myself as the kind of person who would become a runner. It seemed unfathomable to me that I would ever run three miles, let alone 26.2.