Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Almost as soon as I went vegan, people started telling me that my skin looked great, and that I appeared younger, slimmer, and healthier. I'm convinced that of all the changes I've made to my lifestyle, it's the adoption of a vegan diet that has been best for me - physically, mentally, and certainly spiritually.
My Barbies were usually naked. Once, I took their heads off, cut their hair, drew on their short, spiky hair with some markers, then stuck the heads on Christmas lights. Every year, we'd string our tree with those Barbie heads. It looked demonic. My parents were so cool - they saw it as a form of self-expression.
It was about 105 degrees in Chicago. And that's a time when everybody gets tired. I came into the clubhouse, and everybody was sitting around, and I said, 'Beautiful day. Let's play two!' And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There were a couple of writers around, and they wrote that, and it stayed with me.
I've had this terrible stomach problem for years, and that has made touring difficult. People would see me sitting in the corner by myself looking sick and gloomy. The reason is that I was trying to fight against the stomach pain, trying to hold my food down. People looked me and assumed I was some kind of addict.
The song that's mostly changing my career or made the biggest impact on my career would be 'Catch Me Outside.' Mainly because it hit YouTube, and that was, like, my first-ever video, so people never really seen what I looked like or knew exactly what I was about, so that was, like, the first taste of what they got.
Lemon curd is one of the first things I remember cooking when I was old enough to use the stove without supervision. I looked up a recipe in my one of my mom's Martha Stewart cookbooks and went to work, stirring anxiously and monitoring closely for signs that the mixture was thickening so as not to curdle the eggs.
I think tights make a comeback out of necessity every season: you can only go so far with naked legs in the cold! You've got to protect yourself. I remember going to a fashion show and saying, 'And it's okay if I wear nude tights with this?' to the designer, who looked at me like I just killed his dog or something.
I'd come to the country to do my Thoreau bit, so I needed an office that looked out onto the woods for inspiration. I converted one of the bedrooms into my workspace and through its windows watched the wildlife appear each morning with the sunrise. Many were the days I would sit in wonder, coffee in hand, for hours.
I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that's where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy's band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, 'You want to play?'
With a track like 'White Christmas,' everybody has done that song in every format you can imagine, so I just looked at the chords at that particular song and what chords would make it work. That's kind of quite a sad song, and I had this idea of someone singing it in the subway, someone who is homeless, old and sad.
I began as a graphic designer. As part of my work, I created film symbols for ad campaigns. I happened to be working on the symbols for Otto Preminger's 'Carmen Jones' and 'The Man With The Golden Arm' and at some point, Otto and I just looked at each other and said, 'Why not make it move?' It was as simple as that.
I was Jewish, through and through, although in our house that didn't mean a whole lot. We never went to synagogue. I never had a Bar Mitzvah. We didn't keep kosher or observe the Sabbath. In fact, I'm not so sure I would have known what the Sabbath looked like if it passed me on the street, so how could I observe it?
I found people I really wanted to work for; I made myself available to do whatever I could with the skills I had; I took some risk, packing up and moving to Chicago; and I looked for the opportunities that fit for me. So I think the biggest advice is to find people you love to work for who you're going to learn from.
When I see Kate Moss out and about, I think she looks more beautiful than when her hairdresser and make-up artist try and make her look like something else. And I remember when Madonna first asked Versace to book me to shoot a campaign with her, she came to see me wearing hardly any make-up, and she looked incredible.
'Boyz-n-the-Hood' was actually supposed to be written for Eazy's group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them.
I always wanted to play for AC Milan or Real Madrid. Real Madrid, of course, because when I was young, the players that played there were the top players. I was looking at Real Madrid as the best of the best. And AC Milan, they also had good players when I was young, so I looked at AC Milan the same way as Real Madrid.
Both of our children are adopted, and my wife and I didn't go out of ways to find kids that looked like us. We were just happy to have some kids. And people tell me all the time that they look like us, and that's because they learn to smile and laugh and move their head a certain way from studying their parents' faces.
Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there's always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with colour photography. Everything looks more exciting.
Memes can be visual. Our image of George Washington is a meme. We don't actually have any idea what George Washington looked like. There are so many different portraits of him, and they're all different. But we have an image in our head, and that image is propagated from one place to another, from one person to another.
I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick - one of the first people I knew who'd gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called 'Angels in America.' I've never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it.
I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn't share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I looked.
As an artist, illustrator, and photographer, most of my daily work was formed around the Art & Entertainment business, which was about packaging ideas that looked like they were crafted as artist ideas. In the distributed products, my artist credit was hidden inside the package of the artist or entertainment personality.
Way back in the 1970s, I was eating a steak, and I looked down, and for the first time it suddenly looked like flesh to me - like a dead creature. In a flash, I realized that every time I ate any kind of meat, something had been killed for me, and I stopped eating all animals, not just cows and pigs but chickens and fish.
I joined an all-girl band in Detroit and, although I was a pianist and drummer, I was asked to play bass because no one else wanted to. When I strapped it on, it fit me as good as my leathers. At the first gig we played, I looked out at the audience and thought, 'This is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life.'
Mama never told me, 'Bess, you did good.' She wanted the best for us and she was an incredible administrator. She ran those three kids, that house, the whole bit. But if I looked fine, she'd find something wrong - the color, the hem... I used to tell her, 'Mama, don't worry when you're not with me, because you're with me.'
I saw someone the other day with yellow on their eyelids, and it looked so fresh. But I thought if I did that I'd look like a clown. So I went and I bought some yellow eye shadow from M.A.C. and I noticed that when you mix it with water it works better. So I tried it, and I looked like Big Bird. I will never do that again.
Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.
I had a fairly enlightened dad, though if you looked at his resume, it might not seem that way. He was a chartered accountant for Price Waterhouse. He was strict, and we had a very ordered life. To this day, I am the least materialistic person I know, because my father didn't raise me to just go out and buy this or that car.
'Boneless,' even though we were thinking about servicing it to radio, it made more sense putting a vocal on there. This was actually the first time that I really looked at doing a song for radio and kind of let go of some control and listened to a lot of different radio pluggers and had Ultra come in and help out with ideas.
When I grew up in America, I didn't see anyone who looked like me on TV. I feel overwhelmed with the things that people have said to me. When I meet Indian Americans who've lived here all their lives, it's overwhelming people holding me and crying. Someone said to me, 'Thank you for making us relevant.' It's such a big thing.
The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.
I remembered a long time ago when 'A League of Their Own' came out, and they had the opening sequence with an older Geena Davis. We all just thought it was amazing, but you find out it actually wasn't Geena Davis; it wasn't makeup. It was basically finding an actress that looked like her, and then Geena just dubbed her voice.
I remember I took an editorial, and I was so excited. I got the pictures back, and I looked in the magazine, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh!' My arms were half their size, and I had a thigh gap magically, and all these crazy things. My family went out and tried to find my pictures in the magazines, but no one could recognize me.
I guess it's because I do have a younger audience that, you know, parents worry about the role model thing. But when I was younger, I looked up to people, but I never wanted to be them. I always had my own identity. I'm an entertainer when I'm on stage, and they need to explain that to their kids. That's not my job to do that.
I looked into studying psychoanalysis, wrote to the governing body and was about to start the year where they psychoanalyse you, four times a week, before you get to do it yourself. I just thought I'd taken the ventriloquism as far as I could. My act is so deconstructive, and I'd made all the monkey jokes anyone wanted to hear.
All indications are that three and a half billion years ago, Mars looked like Earth. It had lakes. It had rivers. It had river deltas. It had snow-capped peaks and puffy clouds and blue sky. Three and a half billion years ago, it was a happening place. The same time on Earth, that's when life started. So did life start on Mars?
What we're doing here in America is we're making women choose between the family they love and the job that they need. No other nation on the planet is making these choices. In other countries, they've put politics aside and looked at the facts. When women succeed, the world succeeds. We're losing sight of that here in the USA.
The first piece of art that I ever bought-when I could afford it-was a Warhol sketch from the period when he was just getting out of doing commercial work and more into art. It's a sketch of a young guy's face. I guess the gallery that I bought it from thought I would like it because the young guy kind of looked like James Dean.
I'm not going to tell you the movies, but I remember getting halfway through the thing and everything sort of tunnel-visioned on me and I couldn't read the script anymore. I looked at the people and I just turned and ran out in a cold sweat. It took me about a year to study it and feel comfortable going in and reading for people.
When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.
I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the second one. Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing because I knew them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali.
My father was a dark-skinned brother, but my mother was a very fair-skinned lady. From what I understand, she was Creole; we think her people originally came from New Orleans. She looked almost like a white woman, which meant she could pass - as folks used to say back then. Her hair was jet-black. She was slim and very attractive.
It really hurt my heart because 'WWE Fastlane' was in Cleveland, Ohio and I was on the road shows on Friday and Saturday, and then Cleveland was my hometown and we had 'Fastlane' there and I looked on my travel app and it said: Friday booked, Saturday booked and then Sunday not booked and I was like, you have got to be kidding me?
Now a 'funnyman' can get a laugh before opening his mouth - looking funny. Lou Costello was one of your great funnymen. Harry Langdon, Larry Semon; they were all funnymen - they looked funny. W.C. Fields was never a comedian. Slim Summerville was a comedian, yet looked funny. Now if you have both attributes, you are in good shape.
My colleagues and I have gone in the footsteps of our predecessors since the very first day we were called by our people to care for their future. We went any place, we looked for any avenue, we made any effort to bring about negotiations between Israel and its neighbors, negotiations without which peace remains an abstract desire.
I remember times when I was at shows and the person onstage locked eyes with me. And in that moment, everything was right with the world. I think that's part of my job, to create these thousands of moments every night. And for the rest of their life, they can say, 'You guys looked at me,' or 'You sweated on me,' or 'I got your gum.'
The idea that a story has to be 'exceptional' in order to be worth telling is curious to me. What if we looked at every single person's story as a site of possibly infinite meaning? What if we came to believe that there isn't hubris or narcissism in thinking your story might be worth sharing - only a sense of curiosity and offering?
Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was called Wiff-waff! And there, I think, you have the difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it an saw an opportunity to play Wiff-waff.
When Reg died and we first looked into getting a new dog, I was adamant we should pick up a mongrel from an animal-rescue shelter. It's not only that they're usually healthier and have better temperaments, they also fit with my world view - I prefer a ballpoint to a fountain pen, a barber to a hair stylist, and camping over glamping.
All of us are probably three people. We're probably the person that we think we are, and we're probably the person that you or somebody else perceives us to be, and... frankly, we're probably somewhere in the middle. And I think that it's important that there be a balance with respect to how individuals are - you know, are looked at.