My interpretation of the word ‘ugly’… I like ugly beauty. That can happen. In France, we have phrase ‘jolie laide.’ We like certain women who are not pretty or cute – it’s the opposite in France of pretty. It’s more strange and interesting.
I have a wonderful piano that I really love: a handmade Yamaha grand. Sometimes I’m sitting there, and it sounds so good that I find some little melody or a phrase that leads me into a song, but probably more often than not, I actually grab a notebook.
A song doesn’t happen as a whole verse; it happens linearly, line by line, almost word by word, phrase by phrase. And if each phrase, each line, has a proper emotional feel and connects to the line before it and the line after it, the song will be doing what it should be doing.
The phrase ‘mad as a hatter’ was coined because hat makers were poisoned by the high levels of mercury used in felt processing; these workers developed a strange, uneven gait as well as strange alterations in their personalities – traits that resembled mental instability.
Bill Clinton’s incredibly bold idea was to change the grant to a transaction: we’ll give you something, but we demand something back; the way he would phrase it is, ‘We’ll give you opportunity, but you have to take responsibility.’
By 2007, 85% of Americans cited climate change as an important issue, compared with just 33% in prior years. The phrase we invented, ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ became a part of the lexicon.
The phrase ‘dream career’ sounds pretty stupid.
I retain characters more often than plot, but what seems to happen is that I latch on to specific moments, turns of phrase, and dialogue as touchstones for me to recall what happened in the book. Kind of like freeze-frame.
I don’t believe in data-driven anything, it’s the most stupid phrase. Data should always serve people, people should never serve data.
There’s nothing I find quite as annoying as the phrase ‘I told you so.’
I’m definitely influenced by the music. We dance to music, and you have to listen to it and phrase your dancing and movement in a certain way to compliment the music. We have to work hand in hand, the dancer and the music.
The great Muhammad Ali used to have that phrase where he would say: ‘Rumble young man, rumble’ and ‘I’m so pretty I’m ready to rumble.’ I kind of just fine tuned it to ‘Let’s get ready to rumble.’
I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it’s almost too obvious, or it’s too expected. And it’s not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.
I’m pan-Latino, or whatever that phrase is. It’s not a sexy phrase, but it is a sexy, cool thing. That’s how I feel.
Having our privacy exposed is particularly crushing for the British – a nation for whom the phrase: ‘How are you?’ really means: ‘Please say one word, then leave me alone.’
The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.
I always get a little uppity when I hear the phrase ‘TV actor.’ It’s like saying you’re a magazine reporter. I was in the theater for ten years before I ever had a TV audition.
Usually, historical revelations come from days of legwork, ploughing through piles of letters and papers in archives or even private homes, looking for the telling phrase or letter that someone else has missed.
The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
People often ask how I can reject the phrase ‘woman writer’ and not reject the phrase ‘Jewish writer’ – a preposterous question. ‘Jewish’ is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and ‘woman’ is a category of anatomy and physiology.
Natural selection is not an inflammatory phrase; evolution is.
‘Data exhaust’ is probably my least favorite phrase in the big data world ’cause it sounds like something you’re trying to get rid of or something noxious that comes out of the back of your car.
With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.
I use a lot more chords than most organists and I’m careful to phrase them with the guitar.
There is no greater threat to progress than the phrase, ‘That’s impossible.’
America has always been a land of freedom that teaches you that the sky is the limit that you will succeed or you will fail based upon your ability and your effort. And every phrase of the sentence that I just uttered has been smothered in a soft pillow of entitlement, victimhood and security.
It’s such an overused phrase: ‘to be part of the conversation.’ But it’s true. It is nice to be part of the conversation – just be sure they are talking about you in the right way.
There are plenty of problems in the world, and doubtless climate change – or whatever the currently voguish phrase for it all is – certainly is one of them. But it’s low on my list.
I live by honor. I live by integrity. I live by ‘never quit.’ It’s not a cool T-shirt phrase for me.
I remember being interviewed about my first novel, ‘The Colour of Memory.’ They kept using the expression ‘your first novel,’ and I said, ‘No, I object to that phrase, because this is it for me.’
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
To use a phrase that I don’t often use, the NBA is very much a woke league. It’s at the forefront of a lot of things – training, fashion, food, diet.
I’m into really terrible, trashy American horror films. I think the ‘Final Destination’ ‘sinquology’, to phrase it, is brilliant! It’s un-toppable in terms of how incredible it is.
President Reagan, expanding on President Lincoln’s phrase, referred to America as ‘the last, best hope of man on Earth.’ But this last, best hope is beginning to fade.
There’s a lot of people over time who have brought out all these funky records that everybody has started jumping on like a catch phrase… When Planet Rock came out, then you had all of the electro funk records.
All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.
When people hear the phrase ‘risk-taker’, two images come to mind. One is the negative idea of someone who’s reckless and unpredictable, sometimes succeeding and at other times crashing out. The other is a more positive view of a fearless innovator who takes risks when others nervously stand back.
A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
Every good war film, if you want to use that phrase – I don’t think it’s a good phrase, but if you want to use that phrase – every good film, a first-rate film about war, is an anti-war movie.
I love that phrase that parents say to their children when they cry: ‘I’ll give you something to cry about.’
I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam – everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there’s no doubt that moment has passed.
Something I miss terribly from the ’60s – the most important phrase in the English language was, ‘I got hung up.’ Somebody says they got hung up, it’s unassailable, you know? You don’t go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like.
Well I’ve never used that phrase before, but yes she is bootylicious.
I hate negativity. I hate people who say the phrase ‘I hate’. I really don’t like the word ‘hate.’ Dislike, frightened of, terrified of, or yukky – but not ‘hate.’
A lot of people think the orchestra is playing and the conductor doesn’t do very much, but the conductor’s the person that gives shape to the music, gets the phrasing, and if he has really fine musicians in solo spots, the question is does he try to help them phrase, or does he let them go?
Ocarina of Time.’ If that phrase elicits any sort of emotional reaction inside of you, then we really have something in common. When that game came out, I was just reaching the age when N64 was in its prime.
Old-fashioned types used to mutter about whether someone was officer-class material. It’s a phrase stuck firmly in the 1950s, but it expresses an underlying truth: either you are fit to lead or you are not.
Do you know the phrase, ‘The word ‘water’ will not wet you?’ It’s one thing to write down an idea and another thing entirely to execute it.
I have to tell you, I’m a happy man. I’ve lived the life I wanted to live. I’ve written the books I wanted to write. No publisher has ever even suggested that I change so much as a phrase – commas and periods, yes – and I suspect that I have a lot of serious readers; in fact, I know.
Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.
