I don’t really know Hollywood, but living and shooting in L.A. was very motivating, inspiring. The lights, the extras, their American faces, the energy, the Orpheum Theatre. It was all very inspiring.
I certainly wanted my name in lights. I wanted my name on a marquee. I wanted recognition on Broadway.
Sammy was the only one that looked like me, so I naturally gravitated to him. Sammy made it cool to be black at a time when, let’s just say it, it wasn’t very cool to be black. His name was on the front of the building in lights, and he had to go in the back. But you never saw him sweat.
I’m actually not an exhibitionist at all. When you get onstage and you get under the lights playing music, I feel more hidden and more alone than anywhere else. You hide behind your music and let your emotions come out through the music.
I switch off lights like a maniac. I drive at reasonable speeds so that I don’t waste petrol.
Abjure all accretions and turn off the lights. Put on some music – Leonard Cohen, say, perhaps his ‘Various Positions’ – and let your mind cool down. Soon you’ll forget there’s a word called ‘stress.’
If Paris is a city of lights, Sydney is the city of fireworks.
I guess I’m crazy. If everything was easy-peasy and green lights all the time, it’d be kind of boring.
I find airports to be purgatorial in many ways. I mean, even from the basics of the design: you know, this sort of – this muted gray and the fluorescent lights.
As Mick Jagger will tell you, performing is an aerobic work-out. I’ve got the bass guitar, which is the heaviest of all the instruments, and I’m a little girl, in boiling-hot leather under the lights. You have to keep the fitness level up if you want to look good up there.
I moved to New York last year and I love it. It’s a huge change and I’ve always wanted to spend time there. It’s like a more intense London, and everything’s up a few notches. The lights are brighter, the pace is faster and the food’s better.
If you have kids, you feel everything stronger. It’s like someone turning the lights on in your inner room.
The movies were so healing for me because I had such an isolated, lonely childhood. Going to the movies and having the lights go down, you disappear. If you have esteem issues, suddenly you’re in a void where nobody can see you. You are just by yourself in that darkness, and your loneliness is cured.
A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy, the smile that accepts a lover before words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first born babe, and assures it of a mother’s love.
There is nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.
Considering the regular use of make-up and the fact that I’m under the glare of the harsh shooting lights practically all the time, I’m adamant about using really strong cleansing milk to get the make-up off my skin, and I never sleep with make-up on, however tired I am.
You’re blinded by lights and you see all these people who come out, and it’s exciting. It’s scary and it’s exciting all rolled into one.
In some ways any film that you do has an artificiality about it. Even when you’re doing the most kitchen-sinky, gritty, realistic scene you’ve still got 50 people standing around watching you with cameras and lights and things.
I think the thing that keeps us motivated is challenging ourselves to see if we can be better than we’ve been before and seeing if we can stumble upon a magic that wasn’t there before – whether it’s a song, a performance, or a track that lights us up the way the first few records did.
A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green.
I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.
Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process – maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like ‘Lights Please’ happens like that.
The great challenge working on this show for me is wearing polyester all day long and having the worst haircut known to man at the top of my head and sitting under fluorescent lights. That is America, people. Polyester, bad haircuts, under fluorescent lights.
When you move handheld, and the director of photography has the courage to shoot with no lights, the set becomes a space of creativity and freedom where actors can move wherever they want to move.
The criterion for racism is either objective or it’s meaningless: If liberals get to decide for themselves who is or isn’t a racist according to their political lights, conservatives will be within their rights to ignore them.
I write in my house, at my desk, where I have Christmas lights strung over it to try and convince me that I’m having a good time. I can’t really write anywhere else.
The Viennese wash everything. Where else in the world does the government hire public servants to wash public telephone booths and the glass over traffic lights? Every time I see someone doing these things, I smile like a child.
You can’t remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn’t have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.
Diwali is really a happy time. It’s a festival of lights. That’s the only time when the entire family comes together and celebrates together.
Let each dawn find us courageous, brought closer, heeding the lights before the fight is over.
I fancy the romantic image of myself being soothed and inspired by music and the sweet aroma and flickering lights of candles.
When you listen to a Yes album, you should listen to the whole thing through headphones with the lights off.
When I made a breakthrough as an actor, people started to say, ‘Who’s that bloke with the funny name?’ They advised me to change it, saying it would never be put up in lights outside theaters because they couldn’t afford the electricity. But I would never contemplate changing it. It’s who I am.
I’m afraid of the dark, but I choose to sleep in the dark. I can fall right to sleep with the lights on. But I want to be someone who can sleep in the dark, so that’s the choice that I make.
I’m drawn to scenes in movies where you just see characters turning off lights in a room or putting the groceries away; it’s like, ‘I understand that.’ We all have to get ready for bed, and we all do it in a different way, and yet it’s all strangely familiar and strangely human.
In terms of ‘American Horror Story’ and ‘Nashville,’ what attracted me to those, and ‘Friday Night Lights,’ for that matter, is that they felt like something innovative and something that we hadn’t seen before. As an actor, that’s exciting.
The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It’s part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy.
I’ve been to Vietnam and mainland China. Even though the Vietnamese are seemingly poor, they always stop in front of red traffic lights and walk in front of green ones. Even though mainland China’s GDP is higher than that of Vietnam, if you ask me about culture, the Vietnamese culture is superior.
My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‘light’ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.
I love having candles, especially when you get downtime. I could just pass out seeing the flame flicker with the lights off.
The stadium here in Munich is the best of the lot for me. It is absolutely fantastic, especially the way it lights up a different colour according to who is playing. It’s superb.
At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn’t look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that’s completely typical of Seattle. You can’t quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?
I went on to Cincinnati. I had got a taste of the big cities and them bright lights. I stayed there until I was about 18 or 19 and then I went on to Detroit.
It’s true that I’ve driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I’ve stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it.
If you take the ’70s with Blaxploitation pictures, there was a proliferation of black-content films and motion pictures, television, stage plays and so forth at a time when Hollywood was in trouble financially, and it was cheaper to do black films to keep the lights on until they could reestablish themselves.
The end of ‘City Lights’ makes me cry every time I see it – when Charlie Chaplin walks by the shop window and the once-blind girl brings him a flower and pins it to his lapel.
I wanted to be an entertainer; I wanted to be on the big screen. I loved the cameras and the lights.
Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it’s usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is ‘fairy lights,’ which we boringly refer to as ‘Christmas lights.’
