Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What happens with Mad Men, its like an Elvis Costello album; Ill watch it, and then I immediately have to watch it again. AMC will play it back-to-back. I have a tendency to yell at it when my wifes not around because if she catches me yelling at Mad Men, then it gets weird.
I ask a million questions, and I insist on having answers. I think that is what we have to do. I have to know what the director wants. Some are very much in their head, and I need to force it out of them. I just can't play around for eight hours and see if something happens.
Record labels collude with some of the radio stations, and the radio stations have their play lists, dependent upon what they call the, quote, 'hits.' What's commercially viable gets recycled, endlessly repeated, and as a result of that, the progressive music can't break in.
The kind of theater that I do is sort of ‘narrative realism,’ which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.
Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.
If someone was making a movie about F1 in the last six months, they wouldn't need to add a Hollywood ending. If they do make that movie, it's got to be 'The Curious Case Of ,' where I've lived my life backwards. I'd like Johnny Depp to play me but he wouldn't be quite right.
You want to know yourself. For this keep steadily in the focus of consciousness, the only clue you have: your certainty of being. Be with it, play with it, ponder over it, delve deeply into it, till the shell of ignorance breaks open and you emerge into the realm of reality.
When everyone around you is doing all this incredible pirate acting and you're having to sort of play the straight guy and move the story forward, you kind of want to be doing some of that pirate ripping it up stuff, but in truth, to be a part of that project is what I love.
I had one request when I started doing the plays. My prayer was: God let me do well enough to be able to take care of my mother. I was able to do that 'til the day she died because of my audience. So, they've already done enough. All I ask for now is their continued support.
As an actor you get categorized by other people, but it's not like I arrange myself into comedy mode or serious mode. If it's good writing you just have to play it true - if it's funny, it's funny. But obviously you don't want it to be amusing if you're playing Hedda Gabler!
Only since the turn of the century has abstraction again become recognized as an artistic means of representation. It was then that one returned to the recognition of the immense role abstraction plays in the human mind by its power of concentration upon absolute essentials.
... the hardest studio music to play is Tom & Jerry - cartoons. The music makes absolutely no sense, as music. You can't get into hearing it. There's nothing to hear-'bleep!, blop! scratch!' and it comes fast; everything's first take. That'll change the way you look at life.
The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.
Paul Schofield said something like, 'If I'm not acting in a play, I don't really exist.' Those weren't the exact words, but he meant it's only when I'm acting in a play that I've got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it?
Half the time I feel like I'm appealing to the downer freaks out there. We start to play one downer record after another until I begin to get down myself. Give me something from 1960 or something; let me get up again. The music of today is for downer freaks, and I'm an upper.
Everything is not going to go right, not just on the field but also in business. There were times I was injured on the field and could not play for a year or more. It was easy to quit and say, "I can't do it anymore." It taught me I can bounce back. It's the same in business.
Waiting for Godot has achieved a theoretical impossibility — a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps the audience glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice.
But there is a process that happens when you're making something, be it a musical or a new play. That process takes time, and mistakes will be made along the way, and you will go down and hit dead ends. But it is so public now. Any yahoo with a computer can start a firestorm.
The majority of the filmmaking process is in pre-production. The more you've planned out the more freedom there is on set to find new stuff, to play around, find new jokes and let the actors kind of breathe - but it needs to come from a place where it's completely structured.
When I first started acting, I had all these ideals about the kinds of roles I wanted to play, but the reality is that when you do television - and I do a lot of television - you get cast for qualities that you have as a person. So I look for qualities that I like to portray.
As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but bring your own thing to it." In a lot of ways they feel like opposites, but in a sense, my job is to cajole or encourage decisions that I approve of.
My favourite two festivals have always been the Big Day Out and Summersonic in Japan. The Big Day Out is a little more fun because it lasts longer. It's like an abbreviated version of the Warped tour because you get to play with the same people every day, which is really fun.
When I get bored, or get stuck on an equation, I like to go ice skating, but it makes you forget your problem. Then you can tackle the problem with a fresh new insight. Einstein liked to play the violin to relax. Every physicist likes to have a past time. Mine is ice skating.
The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you have played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. Most Russian music, indeed, consists in ringing changes on this device, skilfully disguised though the fact may be.
If I'm playing in the morning, I'll get some carbs early: porridge with chopped banana. If I'm playing in the afternoon, I'll start with less carbs and have some eggs and fruit for breakfast, then a light lunch about 90 minutes before I play, so I don't feel sluggish or full.
By the time I was 19, my parents weren't very authoritative over my life.I didn't have any doubt about that - at that time about what I was going to do or where I was going. I was a musician. I was going to play. I had a band. We were going to make enough money to survive on.
I did a production of 'Journey's End,' an RC Sherriff play about World War I, at the Edinburgh Festival. I was 18 and it was the first time that people I knew and loved and respected came up to me after the show and said, 'You know, you could really do this if you wanted to.'
Just as the pianist practices the most complicated pieces to improve the technique of his fingers, so too a grandmaster must keep his vision in trim by daily analysis of positions with sharp possibilities, and this applies whether he prefers such positions in his play or not.
I was [ on Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition] with Ralph Bowen, and Joel Frahm, Jimmy Greene, John Ellis. You can't play the saxophone better than any of those guys play. So many of those things that those guys could do I wish I could do now, let alone then.
I was staying with my sister and messing around with the guitar every day for my own amusement. Then she took me around and introduced me to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and the first time I saw that onstage, it inspired me to play. I thought that was the world.
When I was first exposed to the films of Ingmar Bergman, I found them frank and disturbing portraits of the world we live in, but that was not something that displeased me. They were beautiful. I thought people would respond to my plays the way I responded to Bergman's films.
It's an under-represented demographic and it's a really loyal fan base and it's really nice to play those roles without making a big deal about it or making too much comment, because the more we normalise it the better. You're not defined by your sexuality but by what you do.
I have had my dance with Folly, nor do I shirk the blame; I have sipped the so-called Wine of Life and paid the price of shame; But I know that I shall find surcease, the rest my spirit craves, Where the rainbows play in the flying spray, 'Mid the keen salt kiss of the waves.
a really good play is ambiguous - which is exactly why it endures. Every succeeding generation develops theories about it. The play's words provide very little clue. On the contrary, words are notoriously imprecise and open to every kind of interpretation, so you must search.
Everything I've done feels like I'm just as much a part of it as if I was the producer. It's still the same job: all of us together figuring out the common good for a song. That's the only thing that matters. It's not like, "I'm the boss, and I'm gonna tell you what to play."
I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes (harmonies) that were being used all the time. I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive.
I picked songs that I've been singing my whole life that stuck with me. I tried to pick stuff that was a variety. And I think the same way I always imagine that people are going to play the record at their house and I imagine them doing stuff with music on, like the way I am.
With that incredible voice that he [Alan Rickman] could play like a sort of wonderful instrument, like a cello or something. He played his voice, and he could be the most subtle of actors. And he could also be quite a big actor. He could do the grandiose performances as well.
For many playwrights, they write the plays anyway because they've got to be, the work has been started, it's got to be finished, but we all long, I think, to see the plays fleshed out on stage and I'm exactly like that. Yes, I'm not satisfied until I actually see it on stage.
Meditation plays a big role in my life. Meditation fortifies my spirit, improves my focus, my desire. When I fight I try to empty my mind. It's called Mushin. When I don't see anything around me, I only see that moment. Nothing else matters. that was how I was taught to live.
I think play and joy and feeling good deserve more of our time. I don't see why adults are supposed to grow out of those things. If I have a mission it's to make everyone who comes to my concerts leave feeling a heightened sense of freedom to play, sing, and enjoy themselves.
I have always wanted to work in the theater. I've always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I've never actually done it - not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I've had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater is a part of my movie work.
I want the vetting to be solid. But I also want to bring these people in because not bringing them in sends a message, right, to the Muslim world and plays into the ISIS narrative and the Al Qaeda narrative, right, that this is a war between religions. And we can't have that.
Lots of kids when they get their first instrument hammer away at it but they don't realise there are so many levels of dynamics with a guitar. You can play one note on a guitar and it really gets to people if it is the right note in the right place played by the right person.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just perfect in 'Veep.' She gets to show off the spiky claws beneath her patrician finesse. The obvious way to play 'Veep' would be to make Louis-Dreyfus a folksy heroine, one with more common sense or populist heart than her enemies. But she isn't one.
If your going to learn to play lead guitar, get an electric guitar .. it doesn't have to be an expensive one .. acoustic guitars aren't good for learning lead, because you can't play up very high on the neck and they take heavier-gauge strings which makes it hard to bend notes
If you are having trouble making a chord, get a book, that is how I learned. There are guitar tuning apps so you can tune your guitar, and just learn how to play along with your records. And it's great to be able to play along with another musician. That is like trial by fire.
It's a long journey - the change can only be measured in increments of five years at a time. For every two steps forward, there is one step back. Don't let that discourage you, because you can play a big part in ensuring that measurable change takes place in the coming decade.
The big push for me is the Olympics this year. If I'm healthy, I'm not worried about my ranking. I think I can hit the ball. It's just about my body cooperating. It's about being able to play matches in a row. Right now, I'm not sure how much I can do with that, but we'll see.
The instrumental record is a bit subtler. It's the kind of stuff on sound check, when I first pick up my violin and start to play, the kind of melodies that just pour out of me. Some of them sound very classical. Some of them sound experimental, polyrhythmic loops that I make.