I just hear a beat and start mumbling words. I just hear sounds and rhythms, and it just kind of comes intuitively. Formatting a song, figuring out a flow, how I respond to the beat.
Lying under oath, and encouraging lies under oath, does go to the very heart and soul of what courts do. If we say we don’t care, let’s forget about courts, and we’ll just have other ways of figuring out how to handle disputes.
I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.
When people say Jerry Lee Lewis invented rock n’ roll, they forget Little Richard. People talk about Elvis Presley and forget he was singing black music. I don’t blame Elvis. It was the music business figuring it could make more money from this music if it weren’t presented from the original source.
I kind of like the challenge of jumping into totally different spaces and styles and figuring out how to fit in.
Swapping a duvet cover is the most stressful chore in the world to me, and I haven’t figured out a way to do it without scuba diving into a giant sac of linen and figuring out if I’m tying the right knots in each corner.
I would rather deal with the vagaries of investing in Africa than in figuring out what the hell else Washington is going to do to the entrepreneur next.
I started singing very early. I was six or seven years old, and I was singing along to TV commercials and figuring out, ‘Oh, hey, I can sing in tune. This is really cool.’ But the songwriting thing came much much later, when I was 19 years old.
I’ve been writing plays since the seventies and only came to moviemaking when I basically realized that I needed some money to pay the rent. I started to watch films with an eye to figuring out how to write them.
I grew up in a single-wide, three-bedroom mobile home with my family. And now I see them, like, half a dozen times a year. Figuring out how to come home and talk to them again and feel like myself has probably been the greatest challenge.
Monsters will always exist. There’s one inside each of us. But an angel lives there, too. There is no more important agenda than figuring out how to slay one and nurture the other.
At 19, I was still figuring out how to throw a fastball.
Everyone is usually screwed up in some way and that is usually where the work comes in – figuring out how to make it believable and make it real to present someone’s problems that you don’t necessarily actually know anything about.
You have to find the balance of figuring out how can I be effective? How can I use my platform for good, you know, without jeopardizing everything so that I don’t have that platform anymore.
What writing a poem really does – and what figuring how to perform effectively really does – is forces people to listen to you. It frames your thoughts in such a way that grabs people’s attentions and forces them to hear the things that you’re actually saying.
No one likes doing chores. In happiness surveys, housework is ranked down there with commuting as activities that people enjoy the least. Maybe that’s why figuring out who does which chores usually prompts, at best, tense discussion in a household and, at worst, outright fighting.
The hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear.
But figuring out Saddam Hussein was one our greatest mysteries. He marched to his own drummer and frequently as this unfolded he made decisions which were sometimes inexplicable to us and sometimes didn’t look very smart.
What I tell my kids is, ‘I’m preparing you for college and for life. So, having independence, knowing how to set your own boundaries, figuring out how to make that balance. We still have screen-time rules.’
Women are better at reading body language everywhere in the world. As a matter of fact, it’s associated with the female hormone estrogen. Women are better at figuring out of tone of voice, reading your face and posture and gesture.
That’s what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.
In college – while figuring the things out that most people do in college – I had no game. No confidence. I had Birkenstocks. And overalls. A budding romance novel addiction. But no cool. No poise. I was trying on a thousand different personalities, but a lot of them were formed by the perceptions of others.
The key to me recovering from drug addiction was figuring out why I was so upset and why I hated myself so much. I realised it was all to do with the way I was viewed by other people.
You can judge the fact that I like video games or wine or love basketball or like going fishing. You can judge all that. But there are certain things that you can’t, and I think people are figuring that out. Me, being from the old school, I figured that out early.
In the pre-production process, I am emailing with the actors or jumping on the phone, and we’re sort of figuring out who the characters are and trying to build the relationship dynamic and things like that. Then, also, I am outlining.
I’ve just grown up a lot and started to encounter some of the big decisions of life in terms of what career I wanted to do and figuring out personal relationships and things.
There’s so many people who come to me here in L.A., promising me this and promising me that. What I’m learning is figuring out what’s real versus what’s just talk.
I’ve always been really involved in figuring out who my audience is and how to reach them.
We went from playing small clubs to quite big stages quite quickly, and a lot of the time, I felt like I was trying to catch up with myself. Figuring out how to take up space was an interesting journey.
The parenting books didn’t work for me; I got my parenting lessons from everything but the books! And it was about figuring things out. So every time I had a thought, I would put down my conclusions and thoughts.
Being an only child, you just have a lot of time on your hands, figuring things out. Just doing music, man – music just came to me.
I love making stuff. There’s a joy in having the first molecule of an idea, then testing it in front of audiences at secret shows that people only know about the day before. I videotape those, study them, enjoy being in the character and figuring out the movie.
I like figuring out where I need to be mentally so that I’m not thinking about the camera and that it’s second nature. I want to get to a place where I can exist within the confines of what you can do with filmmaking and not have to think about it.
Daddy was real gentle with kids. That’s why I expected so much out of marriage, figuring that all men should be steady and pleasant.
Touring is a whole other animal for me and a whole other skill. But I’m having a lot of fun figuring all that out and switching it from internal to external and putting on a show.
I learn every day what it means to love myself, and I’m constantly figuring out what makes me feel empowered.
When I was 13, I was just figuring out how to play ‘Eruption,’ poorly, by Eddie Van Halen.
I learned to absolutely love the feeling of winning a tough match on a tough point or figuring out how to come back when I was down and win ugly. Walking off the court with a W just made me so happy.
My 20s were spent in a room, alone, mixing paints and figuring it all out.
You’ve got to stay positive and go out and work as hard as you can to fix things, and there are going to be adjustments throughout your career, and hopefully it’s a long one, so figuring out how to stay out there and get people out is part of baseball.
My favorite part about working in theater is the rehearsal process. I absolutely love the rehearsal process. Working out the characters, figuring the character out, and the relationships between the different characters. I love all of that, which, unfortunately in film, you get very little opportunity to have.
There’s a lot of new subject matter to learn. You start slowly peeling the onion and start figuring out how the policy and the politics intersect.
I think that every human – and this is something, you know, like, your years from 14 to, like, 23 are kind of, like, super, super existential, and you’re figuring out life.
There is an art to acting, and there are techniques that are acquired. You can be as emotional as you’d like, as a person, but figuring out ways that you can bring specific emotions at specific times and have them be true, and relating to someone as someone that they’re not, is a lot.
Learning what you don’t want to do is pretty valuable, it may be as valuable as figuring out what it is you do want to do.
I found filmmaking to be a very practical art form. It’s about figuring out how to create within the very practical limitations/constraints of time, money, and large groups of collaborators.
The first 10 years of my journey, I was still figuring out who I was, and then I had to redo it all over again when I became bigger. So instead of saying, ‘I’m gay and this is me,’ I started telling the story through my music.
I used cartoons as diaries. I still do. They’re my way of figuring out the world, what’s happening to me or what I’m thinking about.
More attention and thought goes into naming a character in ‘Call Of Duty’ than all the work that can go into certain movies. Blood and sweat and tears go into figuring out the names because they are so important. The call signs say a lot about you. The brotherhood that’s evoked by the name is quite profound.
