Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I write really slowly, and my lines are really, really terrible all the time. It takes so long for me to get them to be where I won't be embarrassed to sing them, and then feel like they're great.
People pitch me the crazy mystery mind-blowing thing all the time. My response is, 'Great, but how do the characters feel about it, and how do we reveal new facets and new dimensions of who they are?'
Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.
I think I constantly refer back to some of the things that I learned in New England and throughout my career. It was a great stepping stone, and it also gave me time to mature as a player and as a quarterback.
There came a point in time when Michael was under a great deal of pressure to alter the film in a way that was just disturbing to him. I had not seen the movie, yet. He phoned me in July of '92 to look at his version.
There are people who expect me to look the way I do on-screen, where I have a great director of photography and fantastic lighting. I'm sorry to disappoint people, but I don't look like that all the time - no actress does.
Because of the Internet, you're sort of forced to deal with people from very different backgrounds and beliefs. It's a great challenge of our time, and depending on when you ask me, I feel optimistic or pessimistic about it.
They amaze me most of those remixes. Some of them are crap. But every time I complain, someone comes up and says they are for a different market that you don't understand. Some of the New Order ones are really great, though.
I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
The riskiest thing I have done in my fifties is to do a Polish accent for a new film. I had a great time working on it and two wonderful people to guide me. A dialect coach that I have known for thirty years and a Polish actor.
For a competitive junkie like me, golf is a great solution because it smacks you in the face every time you think you have accomplished something. That to me has taken over a lot of the energy and competitiveness for basketball.
I have great fans that come up to me, and they just want me to sign stuff. I have a restaurant in Beverly Hills - Prego - and they come in all the time asking for me to see when I'm going to show up. That doesn't really scare me.
I don't know if people know this about me, but I'm into Billy Joel. I'm a huge fan of his and always have been. He's just a quintessential songwriter of our time. Talk about a storied career - so many classic songs and great albums.
When Kellogg's brought up the idea of the tiger, they sent me a caricature of Tony to see if I could create something for them. After messing around for some time I came up with the 'Great!' roar, and that's how it's been since then.
I have great ideas, but the follow through is always really difficult for me. As my kid gets a little bit older, if I feel like I have a little bit more time on my hands, I'd like to get more into developing ideas and writing things.
Really, I'll go anywhere at any time to continue working in theater - it's a passion that I'm thankful I still have. It keeps me creative and on my toes and meeting great people. I can't imagine a better way of working than on a play.
Liverpool is a great fit for me as a club. It's a huge club, and there is a lot of pressure every time you step out onto that field. I've played in front of the Anfield crowd, and it'll be nice to be on the other side of the fans now.
Every time I do something new, it makes me a bit stronger. Playing huge shows, being invited to play with Nile Rodgers after the Brits - all are mindblowing and I have a great team around me who are empowering. It makes all the difference.
It just seemed to me to be a great story, set back in its time but something that seemed to have relevance for our time. Now that the film is coming out, it looks like we're back in another time where repression of expression is all the rage.
For me, the wins and losses in pro wrestling never mattered. The thing that matters is the time on television to tell that story. If you have a two-segment match on television, whether you win or lose, both people's brands win with a great match.
Joining another big time rock band was the last thing I was looking for, but as the tour went on, I really dug playing to a lot of people, the band sounded great, and just being out there again, got me over my depression and so I decided to hop on board.
I'm honored to be one of the guys that is seen as a leader of this great team - a team that has stood the test of time. AKA is one of the only teams that has been around since the beginning of the MMA explosion, and it's a huge honor for me to be named captain.
I'd say I'm drawn to characters that ring true to me. Adolescence is a troubled time for everyone, so a lot of those characters have been troubled, tortured people. It's been a great way to navigate my adolescence by having these more troubled kids as an outlet.
In order to do 'Amores Perros,' I had to skip some time at drama school, so the director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu came up with a great Latin American solution, which was to say I had a tropical disease and had to stay in Mexico for a while. Everyone believed me.
The year 1989 was crucial for me because I had just moved from the country into Sydney to play first-class cricket. That was the time I heard of a teenager called Sachin Tendulkar, who had burst on to the scene and was being annointed as successor to the great Sunil Gavaskar.
I've always been drawn more to film. But 'Bloodline,' to me, feels like a 13-hour piece of cinema. And the great thing about Netflix is you get to be almost like an editor. You choose how much of the narrative you want to watch at a time, which makes you complicit in the story.
Plain white T-shirts do it for me every time. You can spend anything from £3 to £50 on a T-shirt, but I've bought some great ones from H&M, as well as shelling out on Duffer Of St George and a Polish label I discovered while filming 'Robin Hood' in Hungary called Scotch And Soda.
You know, even with the 'Awkward Black Girl' episodes, they come out once a month. That's great for me, it's comfortable, it gives each time to digest, time for new people to get on to it and caught up, but oftentimes I have people who are almost demanding a higher output from me.
It took me a little bit of time in the Premier League. I came back from an ACL and got one goal in I think six months at Crystal Palace. It wasn't great but I got to grips with the Premier League, started to understand what it's about because it's very different to the lower leagues.
The 2001 tour to Australia would have been a great highlight in my career if the Lions had won the series. That might sound strange because it was a great tour in many ways, but, for me, the more time goes by, the less of a career highlight it becomes, and just more of a frustration.
The 'Degrassi' producers were very supportive. They sent me flowers when I got 'The Vampire Diaries,' and then as soon as it premiered and got the great numbers that it did, I got another large bouquet of flowers from them. Every time I go back to Toronto, I see them and hang out with them.
I've been wanting to be sponsored by some kind of hair product for a long time. I have a lot of hair, and it goes through a lot in my training camps anyways, so having some kind of great hair sponsor would probably be awesome for me. I'm kind of hard on my hair, but I think I have nice hair.
My specialty at 'SNL' was doing triage. There was always a great need for someone to say, 'Make this funnier. Give me an ending for this. What's a better big laugh for this towards the end? What's a better physical joke in this?' And I just really, over time, honed that specific thing so well.
When I was a kid, my daily routine was playing make-believe, and I kind of created these stories throughout the day. And when it came time to go to preschool, my English wasn't really so great because my mother wanted me to learn Ukrainian, so she signed me up for these children's theater groups.
In 1977, I had Paul Rivera hotrod six Fender Deluxes for me. At that time, a lot of studio guys in L.A. were using those - not so much live guys but studio guys. They had terrific tone and great technique, and I was like, 'Well, I like having terrific tone even though I don't have any technique.'
I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the 1960s, and I think there was a synchronicity of events that inspired me to be an astronaut, and, of course, the backdrop is nothing less than Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. That was a time in our nation where we aspired to great things, and we achieved them.
Jerry Goldsmith, I have to say, is my single favorite composer of all time. He was one of the most innovative guys ever to do it. You go back to 'Planet of the Apes' and it is just a monumental score - the sound design and approach to percussion was just so extraordinary. One of his great scores for me was 'Alien.'
I'm not someone who has a list of great books I would read if I only had the time. If I want to read a particular so-called classic, I go ahead and read it. If I had more time, I would certainly read more, but I'd read the way I always do - that is, I'd read whatever happened to interest me, not necessarily classics.
Everybody's always asking me: 'What's it like playing with LeBron?' It's really hard to describe. I'm pretty fortunate that I got him my first year. He's an awesome guy, a great leader. You're witnessing such greatness all the time and you try not to take it for granted because you see it so often, in practice or wherever.
I started on Vine because it was such an engaging platform that was the most popular at the time. It came natural to me, and I understood the type of content I needed to make on it so that people could enjoy it. I knew it was a great start, but I had to spread my wings and create something that would last forever - a career.
One of the things that always fascinated me about the Renaissance was that it was a time both of great scientific discovery and also of superstition and belief in magic. And so it was a period in which Galileo invented the telescope, but also a time when hundreds were burned at the stake because people thought they were witches.
My mother didn't let me see color films. I saw a lot of black-and-white films. The first time I saw Basil Rathbone, I was completely taken. To me, that was the epitome of great acting, was Basil Rathbone - not only in Sherlock Holmes, but the Sheriff of Nottingham, and all the terrible characters he had to play alongside Errol Flynn.
I've definitely had a bunch of action scripts sent to me, but again I'm a stickler for directors. If it's, like, an action flick with a great director, then it's like, 'Oh let's look at this thing,' but if it's just like a shoot-em'-up with a first time director, I don't know if that's the trajectory I want to take with what I'm doing.
When I was little, my father was one of the biggest names in Hollywood. Suddenly - and how it happened to him was always a great mystery to me - he wasn't a star anymore; he was on the fringe. From the time I was 14, I was always conscious of a sense of worry, of terrific insecurity - agents, phony talk, the waits for the phone to ring.
I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.
I was in an ESPN interview and was asked, 'Who would I most want to ride a roller coaster with?' and I said Warren Sapp because every time he giggles, you can hear there's a little girl inside of him. I called him a little girl, and he found me on Twitter and was like, 'Are you the Bert who called me a little girl?' I was like, 'Oh, great!'
I became an air display pilot. I used to teach it. I was an examiner for a few years as well. It was great fun. I would still be doing it now if pretty much everyone I knew who was doing it hadn't died. In the first team I joined there were six people in it. By the time I stopped, there was only me and one other left - everyone else had died.
Yeah, I mean I've definitely had a bunch of action scripts sent to me, but again I'm a stickler for directors. If it's like an action flick with a great director then it's like 'Oh let's look at this thing,' but if it's just like a shoot-em'-up with a first time director. I don't know if that's the trajectory I want to take with what I'm doing.