I don’t know how to speak to celebrities. Every time I talk to Alan Menken, I say something stupid and I have to apologize.
My friendship with the great actor and director Alan Rickman did not have a particularly auspicious start.
Rick Wakeman and Jon Anderson have rejoined and gone off again and rejoined, but I’ve been there the whole time, and even though Alan White is the ‘new’ drummer, he has been there since 1972, so he also deserves the credit for being around for 20 years.
Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber is the greatest bad guy in a movie ever.
I had first heard about Alan Turing when I was a teenager. I’ve known about him since I was a kid, and I always wanted to write about him.
Musically, I actually grew up listening to country music as a kid, like George Strait, Alan Jackson… all those guys. So it was kind of weird crossing over from that to pop and R&B, but you know, I love Michael Jackson, Ne-Yo, Usher, R. Kelly, Drake, Boyz II Men.
I found reading Alan Bennett striking because you have this sudden flash of recognition when you read about a boy who has intellectual interests utterly different from his parents.
I read in the ‘Daily Mail’ that I’m one of these ‘foul-mouthed comedians.’ But I’m much cleaner than the people they like. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to think that a 70-year-old – particularly someone like Alan Bennett – would like it, because they’ve seen a lot of stuff.
Alan Turing, to me, always felt like an outsider’s outsider.
Alan Pardew brought me to Southampton and was a great influence and then we had consecutive promotions under Nigel Adkins.
Alan Moore’s writing is almost novelistic. It’s very intricate and wordy and smart.
Yes, I’m happy with Alan Ball’s production of my novels.
People either know Alan Rudolph and love every single one of his films or they don’t know him at all.
The first time I went to New York, I met Alan Freed.
I’m not gay, but I don’t think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I’m also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much.
I’d love to work with Gerry Butler, Alan Cummings, and Ewan McGregor. It’d be amazing if we could do a Scottish Hollywood movie.
I don’t have a style. I’ve never thought of myself as a stylist like the visual stylists I admire enormously – Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker – in which every shot has a great idea in them.
Alan Bennett is a very quirkish man. He laughs in a self-effacing way, which stops you getting close. If you embrace him, he’ll laugh in an embarrassed way and pull away, not to shrug you off, but because he finds it awkward.
It was less in pity than in anger that the world was moved by the photograph of little Alan Kurdi, that dead three-year-old Syrian refugee boy whose name we’re all remembering now on the first anniversary of his drowning, along with his five-year-old brother Galip and their mother Rehanna.
I have always found it difficult to wait for things – whether it was to see my father or sailor brother, Alan, again after their long sea trips, or the chance of a better job, or even new curtains.
Alan was always interested in politics in a major way. He actually believes that anarchy is a politically viable system, but I don’t. I was always interested in putting forward the ideas that represented my viewpoint. I feel the same about anything I’m doing.
I played behind Phil Thompson and Alan Hansen, and they were both brilliant centre-halves.
Even today, when the Obama administration has liberalized travel to Cuba – and failed to reverse that liberalization when Alan Gross was imprisoned – there are limits.
My hairdresser Alan, who I’ve known since I began competing, lives with us, along with his husband Nathan, so I have my own gay gaggle.
I’m pretty sure I’m a doppelganger for Alan Alda. I’m a trannie; I’m a man.
Off the top of my head, Alan Cumming was probably my biggest inspiration, as an actor and as a queer person.
I thought I knew who Alan Turing was. I’ve always loved history, and I was actually shocked by how little I actually knew. I was amazed this wasn’t common knowledge. Why wasn’t he on the front covers of my history books? He’s one of the great thinkers of the last century, and he was sort of pushed into the shadows.
I have few other characters to relate to other than myself. I have enough of a body of work now that the paternal side of Alan Thicke gets a lot of play. I do get a lot of calls to play dads.
I’ll always watch anything that Steve Coogan does in the character of Alan Partridge.
Alan is a great guy, a terrific guy. We haven’t worked together since then, and he’s always working with different artists. I think he sees different dimensions he can see from different guys.
Alan Moore does have a sheen of class. He’s a smart guy, and I’m sure there was a metaphoric level, I’m not denying that, but let’s face it. the main reason he was doing a super-hero comic was because he was working for a super-hero comic book company.
The original Beach Boys are Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, Mike Love, and Alan Jardine.
I know Alan Thompson from Villa, Paul Telfer from Coventry and Roy Keane from my Manchester United days.
In crime fiction, I cut my teeth on early Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and Alan Furst. I always loved the writing of Hemingway and Faulkner. Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy’ has been a huge influence; I think I read those novels four times.
My brother Alan – who was seven years younger than me – died from leukemia when he was 52. He never knew a day’s good health – I wish I could have given him some of my good health. But he was always so cheerful and sweet.
‘Six Feet Under,’ for me, was college. Alan Ball and Alan Poul ran that show and really taught me what it meant to really run a show in a classic way.
I don’t know a nicer guy in the world than Alan Alda.
When I first met Alan Parker, who directed ‘Angel Heart,’ he’d heard so many horror stories about me that he was literally scared to death of me. Right away, he sat me down and said, ‘I’m very scared of you. I’ve heard you’re a very bad boy.’
There are so many books I love for different reasons. For superhero stuff, I always go back to Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ or his ‘Swamp Thing’ run. Those are my two favorites, and there are indie books that I really love, like Eddie Campbell’s ‘Alec’ books and ‘From Hell.’
Alan Alda and his wife Arlene are two of the most life-affirming people I’ve ever met. He espoused equal rights for women while producing, writing, acting in and directing ‘M*A*S*H’; he used to commute between the set and home because he didn’t want to disrupt his kids’ schooling.
Alan Greenspan is going to go down in history as one of the worst Federal Reserve chairmen ever.
Alan Arkin is a good cook.
‘The Imitation Game’ is a celebration of Alan Turing’s life and legacy, and Joan’s final monologue is our eulogy. It’s the thing we all wished we could have said to him.
As someone who’s been doing a lot of classical theater recently, I loved the idea of getting to run around in Steven Alan, and not be in a corset and a wig, and not have a dialect, and get to be in a 90-minute play with no intermission, and get to do real comedy.
Between Alan Freed in Cleveland and Bob Horn and Lee Stewart in Philadelphia and George ‘Hound Dog’ Lorenz in Buffalo, they began to find out that white kids liked black music. It was a very significant period of time before I got there.
Sometimes, if you have a lot of history with a character and a lot of affection, it’s hard for you to do anything with that character. Like with Swamp Thing, for instance, I revere the Alan Moore run so much that it would be hard for me to do my own Swamp Thing. I care too much about the way it was done before.
When I first met Alan, I was absolutely terrified. I was 19, he was Alan Rickman, and he’s got that voice, and I remember meeting him in the hair and make-up trailer and thinking, ‘I’m going to die. He thinks I’m rubbish. Why am I here?’
In this age of vampires, what I love about ‘True Blood’ the most is that it’s a post-modern take on it. ‘Sookie Stackhouse’ series author Charlaine Harris and ‘True Blood’ creator Alan Ball turned that whole mythology upside-down… It’s not just about vampires. It’s about a lot of different things.
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