Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are other people, other economies, governments, cultures, religions, and destinies going on at the same time as yours. You have to widen the scope of your lens and start seeing more. Because Americans, it's easy to make us freak out. When the going gets rough, you have to get conservative. That's what's happened to America in the last eight years. I just try to point out that there's more going on than most people pay attention to.
I'm too drunk to recall much of what I've said. Which, come to think of it, is probably just as well, judging by the way people who are normally quite sensible dissolve into gibbering, rude, opinionated and bombastic idiots once the alcohol molecules in their bloom-stream outnumber the neutrons, or whatever. Luckily, one only notices this if one stays sober oneself, so the solution is as pleasant (at the time, at least) as it is obvious.
Some of the people who are now manipulating photos, such as Andreas Gursky, make the argument - rightly - that the 'straight' photographs of the 1940s and 50s were no such thing. Ansell Adams would slap a red filter on his lens, then spend three days burning and dodging in the dark room, making his prints. That's a manipulation. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.
Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.
Let's stop all of this foolishness and come together as a people or we will deserve the chastisement of God that is about to come down. Especially on the rich and the professional well-educated Black person who could make a way in the desert for our people, but you're so tied to your slavemasters and their children. You don't want to leave them nor do you want to lead your people into doing something for self. We're at the end of it now.
I was 17 when it was being filmed and so I was at an age where you are learning a lot about yourself. I came out of school to film it, and I hadn't been having a good time in school before that. I get quite shy around big groups of people. If I meet people, especially my peers and people my own age, I always struggle because I've always worked with adults and they have a tendency to molly coddle you a bit when you're the youngest on-set.
Tupac Shakur is something that, of course I want to make the Tupac movie, I love Tupac, but when that movie was announced, we didn't even have a script yet. It was just being written. People announce things too soon. If you go to any filmmaker - Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Ben Affleck, Michael Mann - you go in their offices and there are scripts everywhere and there's about four or five of them you really want to make.
This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn't shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they are most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all those thrumming radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced in dissembling.
He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow - in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways - also my head - and I had to turn this way and that. There were nudes that might have been of several different people - sitting - standing - even standing upon the radiator against the window - that was difficult - radiators don't intend you to stand on top of them. (On being photographed by Alfred Stieglitz)
I think Nigerians got it wrong from independence as people became so conscious of the divisions because we wanted so much to satisfy the plurality of interests. I will say, we neglected the importance of real value, human value and the quality of potential in human beings and we contrived phrases like geographical spread, regional quota, etc and allowed mediocrity to reign. I think that is the problem that we are dealing with till today.
I kind of shy away from that idea of being an actress because it seems to me to be such a cliché. Also, if you want to be a serious actress, then it's quite difficult to make that transition without being the blond bimbo in the opening credits. Maybe I'm being idealistic about acting and the idea that they would hire people purely based on their talent and not on their looks. But I don't know if I would be a very talented actress anyway.
The issue is that when you're a critic it's hard to tell the difference between the thrill of denouncing and telling the truth. Telling the truth to me feels more often like denouncing than like praising. There are many more concrete advantages in the world for people who praise than for those who denounce. So if you want to tell the truth, oftentimes you're going to err on the side of denouncing. That's just something I have to work on.
Looking back on it now, I understand why that was not possible [to express ourselves], because the pottery employed a dozen people, not all of whom are making pots. And these people had families, children, and they had to have a wage that would allow them to raise their family and they had to get a paycheck every Friday afternoon. So if we had not made pots that would sell it, would not have been possible for these people to be employed.
It's just a matter of who you are and how you talk to people. Your subjects will trust you only if you're confident about what you're doing. It really bothers me when photographers first approach a subject without a camera, try to establish a personal relationship, and only then get out their cameras. It's deceptive. I think you should just show up with a camera, to make your intentions clear. People will either accept you or they won't.
I am myself a professional creator of images, a film-maker. And then there are the images made by the artists I collect, and I have noticed that the images I create are not so very different from theirs. Such images seem to suggest how I feel about being here, on this planet. And maybe that is why it is so exciting to live with images created by other people, images that either conflict with one's own or demonstrate similarities to them.
Try to look at the bigger picture. The majority of people you date will not be your destination. They were meant to be a bridge. So find the lesson, the growth opportunity so you don't have to keep repeating your pattern and crossing that same bridge over and over again. Once you learn what you need to learn and become more self-aware and emotionally healthy, you will then cross another bridge, and one day you'll get to your destination.
As for not getting things right: I constantly rerun social situations/conversations I experience/have throughout my head, and I'm always writing them down in notebooks or in word documents/the Internet. I feel like these habits and a generally good memory of people/the interactions I have with them (due to studying people having always been my main interest in life) have lead me to being very accurate in things I write in stories/essays.
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to education, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.
Even at legal brothels, sex workers have very little power and control over their workplace. They might have power with their customers on a case-by-case basis in terms of what they want to do and not do, but they don't necessarily have a lot of power in how that business operates. There's this presumption that sex workers are broken people, so how could they engage in something like workplace democracy? How could they even have demands?
I never want movie theaters go away. It is the greatest time out on the town. You go out, it's a great place to go, great location, great hang, great date, good place to be with friends. But as an actor who works hard at making movies, I am glad that no matter what people can see your movie on. It's hard to keep a theater for long time; there are so many movies, so when you leave a theater, you're just glad there's a life for your movie.
Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist. But if unlimited or unbalanced power of disposing property, be put into the hands of those who have no property, France will find, as we have found, the lamb committed to the custody of the world. In such a case, all the pathetic exhortations and addresses of the national assembly to the people, to respect property, will be regarded no more than the warbles of the songsters of the forest.
I think that can also be the downfall at the same time in what's really difficult about being kind of in the public eye, you have so much exposure through the Internet, and you can receive a lot of comments, and you get kind of immediate gratification, but also immediate response from people that can either be negative or positive. But I'm really thankful for the internet because it's allowed me to connect with people so much more easily.
Probably the only people left who think that economics deserves a Nobel Prize are economists. It confirms their conceit that they're doing 'science' rather than the less tidy task of observing the world and trying to make sense of it. This, after all, is done by mere historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and (heaven forbid) even journalists. Economists are loath to admit that they belong in such raffish company.
Naturally looking at something will become so important in your aesthetic. For that, you have to be disciplined, too, in the way that there is a moment to catch and there is a moment to express. The moment to express has to be so pragmatic, because you have to build the clothes; you have to be very, very specific about how you want to describe to other people, for the color of the fabric, the way of sewing things, putting things together.
I try to teach my students style, but always as a part of life, not as ornament. Style has to come out of communicating coherent thought, not in sticking little flowers on speeches. Style and substance and a sense of life are the things literature is composed of. One must use one's own personality in relationship to life and language, of course, and everyone has such a relationship. Some people find it, some don't find it, but it's there.
I don't really have a set-in-stone process or formula. Sometimes the melody is there and I have to chase down the lyrics. Sometimes, the song is there and I have to make the melody fit. What I've learned so far about songwriting is that I can't force a song. If I try to do that, it's hollow, and people know a hollow song when they hear it. It's the song they stop listening to and forget about. I'd prefer not to write those kinds of songs.
You can be the smartest person in the world - which Bill Clinton is, and if he's not, his wife is - and care more than anybody else in the world - which he does, I don't doubt that for a minute. And you can care so much that you're willing to be dishonest - you can tell people one thing but do another because you really know it's for their own good. And you'll still screw it all up. Because the whole premise of what you're doing is wrong!
You never know how things work and what exactly is going to grab an audience. Sometimes even the best material and the best collection of people interpreting that material just for some reason doesn't fly with people. There are a lot of TV shows or movies that maybe aren't as good as others that do work when it comes to finding an audience. It's a mystery, that whole thing. If somebody figured it out, this would be quite a great industry.
My audience is comprised of three categories. The first category contains the people who decide after the first five minutes that they've made a mistake and leave. The second category is the people who give the film a chance and leave annoyed after 40 minutes. The third category includes the people that watch the whole film and return to see it again. If I'm able to persuade 33% of the audience to stay, then I can say that I've succeeded.
I'm pretty sure my audience could be bigger, if I could get it out a lot more different places, but that's what we're working towards right now today. It ain't like I'm at the end of our career or nothing like that, I just now getting started. I been in the game for a long time but I'm just now getting heard by people everywhere else. And they still seem to like it, so it didn't give me nothing but fuel, and motivation to keep it pushing.
The culture of death is imposed by economic and political interests, the arrogance of power, corruption. I blame the first world for having taken our riches for so many years. I am speaking of the superpowers that dominate the life of the world. More concretely, the World Bank, the IMF. Those that have caused and tolerated the death of our people, those responsible for the plundering of the third world. Silence is also part of repression.
I wish people wouldn't just see me as the Asian girl who beats everyone up, or the Asian girl with no emotion. People see Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock in a romantic comedy, but not me. You add raceto it, and it became, 'Well, she's too Asian', or, ‘She's too American’. I kind of got pushed out of both categories. It's a very strange place to be. You're not Asian enough and then you're not American enough, so it gets really frustrating.
Trump's act of construction is not building a building. It is building the meaning of the name "Trump." Because his revenue really comes from selling his name to people who do actually build things. They pay enormous sums of money for the supposed privilege of being associated with the name Trump or the name Ivanka, because of that image construction. That's why it seemed like a good idea for Trump to run for president in the first place.
The Arab rulers are basically unpopular. They are supported by the United States against the wishes of their people. In all of this rather heady mixture of violence and policies that are remarkably unpopular right down to the last iota, it's not hard for demagogues, especially people who claim to speak in the name of religion, in this case Islam, to raise a crusade against the United States and say that we must somehow bring America down.
I'm naive. I will admit that I'm naive. There's a part of me, honestly, to the depths of my soul, that doesn't understand why people hate this country. Intellectually, I understand it. I understand the politics of grievance, and I understand the way people have been taught, but compared to every other place human beings have lived before this country and since it was founded, it makes no common sense to hate this place, and yet people do.
Once born into childlike faith, brimming with belief, typical people begin to lose their faith. Society mocks them. Their friends smirk. They come to change the world, but over time the world changes them. Soon they forget who they were; they forget the faith they once had. Then one day someone tells them the truth, but they don’t want to go back, because they’re comfortable in their new skin. Being a stranger in this world is never easy.
I've always strived to find those records that people don't know, but they actually go "Wow, what is this?" - and they go crazy to it. To me, that's more rewarding as a DJ, and that's what I always thought a DJ was supposed to do: it's about educating people. Now there seems to be a commercial edge to stuff and people are reacting to stuff they've heard on the radio all day long: to me, that's not what youth culture should be reacting to.
To students: I pray that all those young people who have graduated, do not carry just a piece of paper with them but that they carry with them love, peace and joy. That they become the sunshine of God's love to our people, the hope of eternal happiness and the burning flame of love wherever they go. That they become carriers of God's love. That they be able to give what they have received. For they have received not to keep, but to share.
Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.
So it's a dangerous thing and conversely, the other thing I mentioned in that post was that people see guys who are kind of in touch with that and become famous for it and then think maybe they can get in on it. Maybe they're not quite as cynical as that and there's some sincerity about them, but they don't really get it so they just imitate what they've seen from people who've done it before and of course you can make big money that way.
I don't even think people are even making an effort to understand Trump. I'm thinking primarily of Democrats and media here. I think they're so arrogant that they don't look at Trump as anything other than a badly molded piece of clay that has to be fixed and reshaped and reformed. And there isn't any interest whatsoever in actually finding out what the guy is or what makes him tick. The only objective is to shut him down as he ticks now.
Truth is, right now two bombs could drop out of the sky and blow up this house and whatever building you're in and just obliterate Dischord and Pitchfork. And there'll be some people crying, there'll be some slow singing, but for 99% of the world, it won't even affect the fly on their soup. Most of the world never have, or ever will hear of me, Fugazi, or Pitchfork. Right now, someone just got killed in Ukraine. Do you feel any different?
I don't think actually that kind of ego check or "I could do better" mentality probably serves better in Hollywood, because it's definitely not a meritocracy. You can look at any number of careers and sort of see that they don't really make sense if it was only based on your movies working either creatively or financially. There are people that move ahead without that, and there are people that don't move ahead even if they did have that.
I'm not sure that Eastern culture does either, but I've never lived in India etc so I couldn't tell you. I can say we definitely don't. So people will sometimes come in contact with something strange and think, "Oh, it must be like this" and have a lot of fantasies about it, and somebody who sort of looks like our fantasy version of what enlightenment is can be very convincing in seeming like they've got something and then play that role.
As I set out to begin photographing Shanghai, I encountered the insider/outsider phenomena in the most personal of ways. You would walk into an old neighborhood in the center of city, and people would begin to point at you. People would begin to talk about you, spreading the word about the outsider who has wandered into their midst, look at him, he's got a camera, what's he doing, is this allowed, is this OK, how should be respond to him.
I always get a little bit pissed off when stand-up comedy is not recognised as being as good a craft as being an actor. We give Oscars to people and it's like, 'Aw, this person is the greatest person on earth', but being an actor is pretty easy in comparison to stand-up comedy. It's no surprise that several stand-up comics have gone on to become great actors. I don't know any great actors that have gone on to become great stand-up comics.
There is always magic to be summoned at any point. I love to live in a world of magic, but not a fake world of magic. We all really basically have a lot of magic... It’s only those of us who choose to accept it, that really understand it. It’s there for everyone. That’s the only thing that I feel I am able to give to people and that’s why I know that they respond to me because I try to give them only their own magic... not mine, but theirs
Peace is here now. It's just that we don't recognize it. Let's say that 98 percent of people in the world are wanting peace. Now people say, even people from Siberia? Yes. We want world peace. The two percent is really tying to mess it up. It's so sad in a way, because by messing it up what are they going to get? Their children are going to suffer, their grandchildren are going to suffer, and they might even die before something gets good.
Hellenic science is a victory of rationalism, which appears greater, not smaller, when one is made to realize that it had been won in spite of the irrational beliefs of the Greek people; all in all, it was a triumph of reason in the face of unreason. Some knowledge of Greek superstitions is needed not only for a proper appreciation of that triumph but also for the justification of occasional failures, such as the many Platonic aberrations.
You frequently hear the phrase "culture eats strategy for lunch!" This is something that they don't teach you in school and few leaders appreciate. Cultural influences come at you from two different directions. There is the organizational culture that you must understand if you are to impact significant strategic initiatives. If the "people" are on board, you can achieve anything. Vice versa if they are not - you will not achieve anything.