When I started out, I preferred to watch my films without music, as its presence tends to mask the underlying pace of the film. I felt I could feel the rhythm of the film better without music to influence me.

You are an instrument if you understand your voice and how to use it - this sound, that sound and certain ranges and different pitch. Within that I try to find a rhythm and play the voice as if it was a horn.

I really enjoy picking up the physical rhythm of somebody else, speaking with their voice. I've never done in anything in my own voice, and I can't imagine what that would be like. It would be weird, I guess.

There's something about the rawness of the live thing, there's no rhythm guitars behind the solo, nothing other than what you hear the people playing at that moment. It's exciting, it's about the performance.

The way one perceives a book and a film are totally different. You read a book in the privacy of your room. You are the boss; you set the pace and rhythm of your reading. In the movie house, you can't do that.

If I think something's funny, I try to mold it into a joke as soon as possible. Once I have a joke, I say it a million different ways on stage until I find a rhythm and it feels like it's as good as it can be.

Personal style isn't simply an exercise in parroting but rather an exhibition for our own stories - from the gait of our walk to the rhythm of our speech to the manner in which the necktie falls from the knot.

Pick a theme for your material, and stick to it for the entirety of the piece. The repetition of certain key phrases, however irritating they may sound, will give your set rhythm, and the illusion of structure.

Certain songs by hearing the rhythm, it tells you that is either a love song or you might be heartbroken or the songs give you the vibes and you just know that certain songs are militant that you have to write.

James Brown came from that hard, rough life that I came from. He took the blues and added rhythm to it. And he always had the most funkiest band; I liked the way he took his words and mixed it in with the band.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

It seems extraordinary to have waited so long into one's life to have found the part that actually uses your basic rhythm. And I think that's always sort of what actors connect up with - their own sort of world.

Once you are successful, there's a very seductive rhythm at work that keeps you wanting to outdo yourself. By the end of 'Spirit' I felt like I didn't want to get into that trap. It almost makes you cartoon-like.

I like to find music that shares a rhythm with the sentences I'm working on. And though I'll probably regret saying this, I think some songs actually don't sound too bad when they're played through lousy speakers.

There can be a lot of mind games going on between the players. When you're about to serve, people will try to throw you off your rhythm by taking a walk. If you're tired, you can't show that at all to an opponent.

You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.

Or the other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm.

There's a certain groove you pick that makes the music flow, and when you have it it's in your pocket. It's the feeling behind the rhythm... to me, the hardest thing to strive for is that feeling, behind the groove.

I know I can't dance. I am the worst dancer. I have no rhythm. I just do step-and-snap. I love it in the privacy of my own home and every once in a while at a club. But singing and dancing are my two greatest fears.

It's funny: I look at songs, and I guess they each tell a story, and the different songs talk about different things. But they're unified by the rhythm underneath and the way that we decided to arrange and play them.

Seeing the ball go in during the game, getting to your spots, getting spot-up shots. You have that rhythm and you have that confidence in yourself. And everybody else has that confidence in you too, more importantly.

When I started out, even though you had your rhythm section, they were big horn sections, strings, live people laying on every part of the floor in the studio waiting for their chance to get on that one little track.

If the rhythm or beat of the music changes with a live orchestra, you have to think on your feet. If you feel like you are not on your leg, you have to make a decision to make it look as though nothing is going wrong.

I love Ruth Brown, not just her singing, but Ruth Brown has more girl power than anyone, because she fought hard against people who ripped her off and then helped other artists through the Rhythm and Blues Foundation.

I don't even know if hip-hop is music anymore. It's definitely rhythm. It's definitely tempo. It's definitely beats per minute. But it's product. And television is product placement for the most part. It's not passion.

The slow rhythm of the body, the insistent rhythm of the wit, were they becoming irreconcilable in modern civilisation? The sedentary life, frustration and irritability; work with the body, fatigue - and peace of mind.

Nature promotes mutualism. The flower nourishes the bee. The river waters quench the thirst of all living beings. And trees provide a welcoming home to so many birds and animals. There is a rhythm to this togetherness.

As Jeopardy devotees know, if you're trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all. On any given night, nearly all the contestants know nearly all the answers, so it's just a matter of who masters buzzer rhythm the best.

I think the most important thing about learning comedy is to start from who you are. If you begin the process by imitating what you perceive to be a comedy rhythm, you will get laughs sooner, but you will not be unique.

I can put a hip-hop beat to reggae. That is, I can have real reggae in the drums and in the rhythm, and on top of it I can put The Rolling Stones' feeling, anyone's feeling on top. Nobody has ever done this before, man.

I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.

Some games you're going to be able to get rolling, you're going to get in a good rhythm, you're going to be able to get open looks. Other games, sometimes the rhythm's not there and you've got to get off it a little bit.

You still have to enjoy the tour games. If you go out there and just go through the motions, you can easily get into bad habits, you lose a bit of rhythm or a bit of form and then things can go pretty bad pretty quickly.

I feel like there are a lot of positives in my swing. I'm really going to work around the rhythm of my swing, being able to keep my rhythm and being more consistent. Consistency is what I'm looking for, performance-wise.

I don't know much about pop music, and we sample music from all different cultures. I was trained in West African dance, so my sense of rhythm when I move is obviously informed by that, and I obviously sing in Portuguese.

I did a lot of theater, so especially as an on-camera camera actor, there are so many things that aren't in your toolbox. They're somebody else's job. You think about editors and rhythm. Volume isn't even in your control.

Without the Fender bass, there'd be no rock n' roll or no Motown. The electric guitar had been waiting 'round since 1939 for a nice partner to come along. It became an electric rhythm section, and that changed everything.

Cumbia is a beautiful rhythm. It's a music that has indigenous, African and European components. It's played in all of America - from Argentina to the U.S. It has mutated and been nurtured by everyone who comes across it.

That's why Tennessee Williams was a great writer. Poetically, dramatically, it was fantastic stuff. And with the landscape, the losers in life populating it. His short stories have got rhythm, something musical about them.

I certainly think, obviously, rhythm is a huge part of being an actor. It just is unconscious, to a degree, but particularly in comedy, rhythm is pretty essential, and there's probably something more physiological going on.

The jazz rhythm won't be understood by the bulk of my audience. That's the problem. We can get away with maybe one tune a night. It depends on where we place it. A song like 'Beyond the Sea,' the fans love that. It's fresh.

When I say dance music, it's anything that makes me want to dance. It could be Timbaland and Missy Elliott, but it could also be disco music and samba music: It's not relying on melody in the same way; it's more about rhythm.

But my role is to just apply the skills I've learned over the years: you listen to the guitar, you listen to the vocal melodies, you listen to the rhythm, and you come up with something that helps you take the song somewhere.

A British actor will savour every syllable of a Shakespearean line, while a French actor will drive to the end of a sentence or a speech with a propulsive rhythm: the thing you never say to a French actor is, 'Take your time.'

When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.

I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.

I write most of my stuff when I'm on a train or a plane, any mode of transport. I like trains because you hear this motoric rhythm and the scenery is great. You go into your own little world. You don't have to be anywhere else.

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