Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Oprah Winfrey is a big role model for me from a business capacity and a creative capacity. She is an incredible interviewer who cultivated a certain style by inserting her own personhood into a show on national television at a time when no one was talking about empowerment, spirituality, or our inner lives.
Maori get pigeonholed into the idea they're spiritual and telling stories like 'Whale Rider' and 'Once Were Warriors,' quite serious stuff, but we're pretty funny people, and we never really have had an opportunity to show that side of ourselves, the clumsy, nerdy side of ourselves, which is something I am.
My primary passion is film-making. That's the aspect of my life that defines me, completes me, and completely grounds me. Everything else - from judging a reality TV show to hosting a talk show - is just a result of me being a film-maker. I am the happiest, satisfied and at peace when I am behind the camera.
We all have our likes and our dislikes. But... when we're doing news - when we're doing the front-page news, not the back page, not the op-ed pages, but when we're doing the daily news, covering politics - it is our duty to be sure that we do not permit our prejudices to show. That is simply basic journalism.
I don't have time for their judgement and their stupidity and you know they lay down with their ugly wives in front of their ugly children and look at their loser lives and then they look at me and they say, 'I can't process it' well, no, you never will stop trying, just sit back and enjoy the show. You know?
Rational anxiety is when you're aware of the source of your anxiety. Like, if I have to host an award show or talk to millions of people on the radio, I'm going to feel anxious, and I know why. Irrational anxiety is when I'm leaving CVS, and there's a car behind me, and I'm wondering if he's following me home.
You show up in Paris, and on the drive from the airport to the hotel you're like, 'This is so cool! I want to see something! I want to go to the Eiffel Tower!' And then you leave the next morning. You think, Oh, I didn't get to do anything. I tell people: I've been just about everywhere, but I've seen nothing.
If I were to ask you who the first million-pound show winner was on British TV, you'd probably go for Judith Keppel. She was, indeed, the first 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' contestant to win £1 million, but the first one on TV was actually Clare Barwick, who won £1 million on Chris Evans' show 'TFI Friday.'
A tournament pays me to show up because the fans want to see me and I move the needle at the box office? That's amazing. It's good for tennis, good for me and good for the event. If a sponsor wants to pay to put their company name on my shirt because they think I'm a strong ambassador for their brand? Heck yes.
You might not be a big fan of politics, but you can still participate. All you need to do is vote for people you believe will work on these issues, and if they don't work the way they should, then it is your responsibility to call them, organize a town hall, and demand that they show up - hold them accountable.
I would say get to know somebody who isn't exactly like you and doesn't come from the same background as you, educate yourself and then just keep showing up. Finding ways to show up for people and your voice will come out of that relationship and out of your pursuit to seeing people who aren't exactly like you.
More and more, you're seeing television shows that are better than 99% of the movies out there. I mean, you watch something like the last couple of seasons of 'The Sopranos,' which is some of the most sophisticated writing I've ever seen filmed and some of the best filmmaking I've ever seen - and it's a TV show.
My wife Martha used to call me Ol' Lemon Face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucille. I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I'm in torture, when in truth, I'm in ecstasy. I don't do it for show. Every fiber of my being is tingling.
You can count on one hand the white rappers that have made it. So I just wanted to show the point of view of an actor in Hollywood, because what could be more soft than that. Rapping about auditions and acting and stuff. I thought it was just uncharted territory to clown on, so that pushed through with Dirt Nasty.
You don't have to get into, 'I'm a leftist or a rightist, I'm Democrat or Republican.' You don't have to get into that kind of nitty gritty type of detail, but at the same time to show that you do have a stance is very, very important. To preach the good word of just being a good human being, being a humanitarian.
We had a show called NXT, and Daniel Bryan was my rookie, and I was his pro. And the object was for the pros teach the rookies what it's like to be a WWE Superstar. As soon as that hit the Internet, the Internet thought it was absurd: 'How dare WWE put Daniel Bryan as Miz's rookie? Daniel Bryan should be the pro.'
Twitch is a platform. Switch it on, and you'll find thousands of channels of pure gameplay rolling around with people talking in the background. Dig a little deeper, and you'll also find people talking on camera, with sets built like an actual talk show, and schedules of events posted at the bottom of the web page.
Human bodies are designed for regular physical activity. The sedentary nature of much of modern life probably plays a significant role in the epidemic incidence of depression today. Many studies show that depressed patients who stick to a regimen of aerobic exercise improve as much as those treated with medication.
Every year in Edinburgh, I end up waiting behind the curtain about to go on stage, and I have a moment of thinking, 'No one's told me what to do with this show. I've done exactly what I wanted. This is the biggest arts festival in the world, and all these people have shown up. Aren't I lucky?' It really is amazing.
You get tough when you grow up unloved. People described me as a boyish girl - rather shy, but I didn't show it. I had an attitude. I was rather wild. I lied a lot because I knew the alternative was to be punished. As I got older I realised I didn't have to lie any more and it was a nice feeling. I could be myself.
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 had accepted a position as a business analyst at Deloitte Consulting in New York. But before I went into that workforce, I decided to take a year off and went to India to do a social enterprise fellowship. It wasn't the best fit, but that was where a TV show in Korea found me and invited me to first come perform.
I took some voice lessons here and there as a teenager but nothing too serious. I started taking it more seriously when I was in Miss Saigon. I needed to improve my technique in order to survive doing that show as many time a week as I was doing it. It's not an easy show to sing, so I needed all the help I could get.
We did wanna change the name. We were actually putting names in a hat. It was the people making an income off Motley Crue that talked us out of it. The booking agent was getting them between a half a million and a million dollars a show as Motley Crue. Then there was the manager who got 10 to 15 percent off Motley Crue.
We live in a culture that's been hijacked by the management consultant ethos. We want everything boiled down to a Power Point slide. We want metrics and 'show me the numbers.' That runs counter to the immensely complex nature of so many social, economic and political problems. You cannot devise an algorithm to fix them.
The irony is that it was tougher to rent a car from Cerberus when it owned Alamo than to buy a semi-automatic. To rent a car, one had to provide ID, a drivers' license, and get insurance coverage. To buy a gun? Cash and carry, from the back of a station wagon at a gun show. No concerns about downstream liability or risk.
With commentating, I've had a chance to show the humorous side of my personality that I didn't use on the court. It's fun, and I don't take myself too seriously. I have good broadcast teams with me, but I'm not a huge stats guy. I think they post the numbers too quickly, and I'd rather let the match play out a bit first.
I worked with Michael Black and Michael Showalter on their show 'Michael and Michael Have Issues.' We did some stuff on that, but it ended up not getting picked up for a second season. There will be more stuff, but not right now. Michael Showalter and I are literally next-door neighbors. We see quite a lot of each other.
To me, when - just like when you watch a movie or you watch a TV show, to me, you know, Nicole Kidman or Leonardo DiCaprio, you know that they are actors, but also, great actors find that extension of themselves. So, when I walk through that curtain, I find the extension of myself of being the Ravishing Russian in there.
There's very little you could do to prepare to be a correspondent on 'The Daily Show,' because it's not being a journalist, it's not being an actor. It involves elements of both of those things, but they're not required necessarily as job experience. It's helpful if you know how to improvise, but again, not a requirement.
I'm glad I was born when I was. My time was the golden age of variety. If I were starting out again now, maybe things would happen for me, but it certainly would not be on a variety show with 28 musicians, 12 dancers, two major guest stars, 50 costumes a week by Bob Mackie. The networks just wouldn't spend the money today.
Having done a lot of magazines, I'm very curious how big magazines handle big stories, and I was very curious to see how 'Time' and 'Newsweek' would handle 9/11. And I was basically pretty disappointed to see that they had chosen to show the photo we'd already seen a million times, which was basically the moment of impact.
I am excited to show people how, when you get older, you get deeper, you get more raw, you get more honest, and you stop pretending to be the person you think people want you to be. I stopped worrying about what people wanted me to say and just sort of dug deep into my personal arsenal of my mistakes and shameful thoughts.
In my real life, both my bosses are gay. On the 'Real Housewives of Atlanta,' Andy Cohen is gay, everybody at Bravo is gay - we call them the gay mafia. Over at 'Glee' and 'The New Normal,' my boss Ryan Murphy is gay. On the show, my boss, played by Andrew Reynolds, is gay in real life. I'm surrounded by all my gay bosses.
I always wanted to be a zookeeper when I was growing up, and I've wound up a zookeeper! I've been working with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years! I'm the luckiest old broad on two feet because my life is divided absolutely in half - half animals and half show business. You can't ask for better than two things you love the most.
Black Lightning, Jefferson Pierce, Thunder, and Lightning deserve their own show because they are not 'the other.' They are legitimate superheroes in their own right, and so they deserve the full breadth of exploration. That's what makes them worthy, and that's why they deserve it. They are not 'the other.' They are 'the the.'
Turning pro is a mindset. If we are struggling with fear, self-sabotage, procrastination, self-doubt, etc., the problem is, we're thinking like amateurs. Amateurs don't show up. Amateurs crap out. Amateurs let adversity defeat them. The pro thinks differently. He shows up, he does his work, he keeps on truckin', no matter what.
Predating the Internet and predating videos, you had an active imagination. You would hear sounds and then get mental pictures of what these sounds felt like to you. It engaged you and made you more invested in it. It made you want to get tickets to the show, buy the album, put the poster on the wall. Now it's sensory overload.
It is hard to imagine Andre Le Notre laying out the exquisite landscape designs for Vaux-le-Vicomte, and later the magnificent Chateau de Versailles, with no high hill to stand on, no helicopter to fly in, and no drone to show him the complexities of the terrain. Yet he did, and with extreme precision, accuracy, and high style.
I went to school with Steven Wright, who was the shyest guy I knew, and one day someone suddenly told me that he was in a club doing standup comedy. I went down to his club and he was great. Another friend of mine, who was pretty much a thief by trade, was hosting the show. So I thought, 'If these guys can do it, then so can I.'
For me, growing up in New York, it started with Elvis Costello and the Clash and then got into louder things like Bad Brains and Stimulators, because those were, like, the local bands. Then I started getting into bands from England like the Slits. I remember seeing Gang of Four at Irving Plaza; that was a really big show for me.
Before the show, we see all these radio people, and most of them say, 'Garth, you're a lot calmer than I thought you were gonna be.' But when the members of the band give one another that handshake, and the lights go out, and the crowd goes up, then you're sliding into the elevator, man, your heart is just going bopbopbopbopbop.
I was once dressed as a mermaid for a Jean Paul Gaultier show. My legs were bound into a fish tail, so I had to come down the runway on crutches. Halfway down, I was supposed to unzip the fish tail to reveal my legs, but the zipper broke, so I ended up stabbing my fake nail through the fabric of the zipper and ripping my way out.
A lot of folks focus on using Twitter as a marketing tool. They'll have a bump that says something like 'Tweet about the NewTeeVee show! Use the hashtag #newteevee.' And that's great - folks should definitely do that. What gets us really excited, though, is when they go an extra step and start to transform tweets into TV content.
I was working for a Swedish TV show - I'm Swedish - who basically did kind of spectacular stories. It was almost like CBS '60 Minutes,' but a Swedish version where we actually did travel quite a lot. After a while, I realized that travel is the most fun part of this, so why not do it for a longer time and just go off and explore?
Don King is my promoter, and I want to fight for him. I want to fight in the big fights, and hopefully he can see by me promoting my own show, beating a quality opponent, and bringing a crowd in, that he needs to use me again. The end goal is I want to be thrown in the deep end by Don King. If I'm not good enough, let's find out.
I have really fond memories of growing up in Chicago, and I always love going back. I still have a lot of really good friends from high school that I go to dinner with. It's kind of become a tradition when I go out there to do a show to give a few friends a call, tell some funny stories about high school and walk down memory lane.
I went into a Beverly Hills shop to buy an attache case. They had 250 cases on their shelves. I asked an attractive saleswoman if they carried one made of belting leather. She said 'no.' That was the end of the conversation. She made no attempt to show me another case that would provide equal service. I didn't buy an attache case.
Some Nickelodeon executives were worried about backing an animated action show with a female lead character. Conventional TV wisdom has it that girls will watch shows about boys, but boys won't watch shows about girls. During test screenings, though, boys said they didn't care that Korra was a girl. They just said she was awesome.
When you're guest-starring on another show, it really requires you to jump through hoops in a way, because you're servicing the stories of the main characters. You have to be able to portray a lot of different elements. You show up and get on board and get on their journey; you have to be flexible as to what they need for the role.