I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, ‘Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.’
We were for Mao, but when we saw the films he was making, they were bad. So we understood that there was necessarily something wrong with what he was saying.
The hardest thing about being famous is that people are always nice to you. You’re in a conversation and everybody’s agreeing with what you’re saying – even if you say something totally crazy. You need people who can tell you what you don’t want to hear.
Certainly I’m not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I’m a sponge. I’ve always been a sponge.
I saw ‘Taxi Driver,’ and ‘Taxi Driver’ kind of saved my life. The scene where Robert De Niro is looking at himself in the mirror saying, ‘You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Who the hell else are you talkin’ to?’ That’s the scene that changed my life by changing my attitude about acting.
I think the whole definition of a geek is somebody being passionate and focused, and being proud of saying that they’re passionate and focused, on a narrow range of subjects.
Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass – the slave narrative – speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying ‘I,’ meaning ‘we.’
I don’t know of many people who’ve done sex research with an eye toward people saying sex is bad for you, except for the promiscuity and cervical cancer link – which is actually a valid discovery.
What’s it like finding out Denzel Washington wants you to direct his next movie? It’s like getting a phone call from Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan saying they want you to coach them.
I was the first actress in the family, and I am still the only actress in the family. I shouldn’t be saying it, but it slipped out!
Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
No one should be ashamed to admit he is wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
It’s an incredible dilemma to be an artist of color and to always be in denial about that, saying, ‘I’m a choreographer first and then I’m black,’ when in fact, that’s not the case. I’m black first and then I’m also a choreographer.
I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‘I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.’
I’m going to put a museum on my ranch and people keep saying, ‘That’s a huge idea.’ Yeah, it’s big, but not bigger than the average big movie. A hundred million dollars in the art world is a substantial amount of cash to do anything. That’s maybe a big gallery’s total sales for a given year.
The last thing they want is a revitalized economy now. I’m not saying the Democrats don’t want a strong economy. Don’t misunderstand. They just don’t want it now.
To read Transtromer – the best times are at night, in silence, and alone – is to surrender to the far-fetched. It is to climb out of bed and listen to what the house is saying, and to how the wind outside responds. Each of his readers reads him as a personal secret.
I’m tired of Glen Matlock saying he was the songwriter for the Sex Pistols. I co-wrote as many songs… but I don’t go shouting about it.
You never saw Peter Sellers the actor trying to make you laugh. All he was doing was the character. What I’m saying is that I don’t think you should know you’re in a movie. I don’t like it when actors are winking at the audience and saying, ‘Right, isn’t this funny? Are you with me?’
I’ve found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they’re communicating but it tells you a great deal – by dialect and tone, content and circumstance – about the quality of the character.
I’ve learned I’m not lying by not saying anything, so I just don’t say it anymore.
Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.
There will always be people saying things can’t be done. And history shows that time and time again things ‘couldn’t be done’ and they were done.
I often joke that 100 years from now I hope people are saying, ‘Dang, she looks good for her age!’
‘Curvy’ is just a polite way of saying ‘fat.’
Most of us have heard the saying, ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness.’ That’s a sentiment I value, but another virtue has inspired me to revise that saying. As far as I’m concerned, what’s next to godliness is resourcefulness.
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money.
I’m saying that the depth of exploration of the male psyche and the female psyche is uneven. I see further, deeper renderings of what it means to be a man.
Narcissism is a fact of life – it’s a natural part of growing older, right? It’s a part of your development. So being angry about the younger generation being ‘narcissistic,’ that’s like saying ‘Oh, this young generation only wants to poop in their diaper! They don’t want to use the bathroom!’
I am very worried about politicians who know that their countries are greatly benefiting financially and at the same time are saying that the European Union is not good for us. The message has to be coherent.
Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.
I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, ‘And now… My Novel!,’ which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
I think it’s a shame that the day somebody hears about a shooting, the first thing they think about is, ‘How can I go promote my gun control agenda?’ as opposed to saying, ‘How do I go pray and help the families that are suffering?’
Most of the time it’s the role. Sometimes it’s the story and sometimes it just the paycheck. It’s the little movies that come out as stories or the fact that I have work to go out, you know what I’m saying, you can only be out so long without work, you start getting antsy.
The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I’m finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.
This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other has failed. Utterly failed.
Working on ‘Nightmare Before Christmas,’ I had endless arguments, like the studio saying, ‘You can’t have a main character that’s got no eyeballs!’ ‘How is anybody going to feel for somebody with just eyesockets?’ You know? So, it’s those kind of things that really wear you down.
The poem is a form of texting… it’s the original text. It’s a perfecting of a feeling in language – it’s a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.
When morning comes, you would better find yourself saying: ‘I have so many choices of what to do or what to leave – every morning, every day. I better judge for myself, and – go ahead and do it.’
London 2012 was the toughest time in our relationship but also the best. Things could get fractious – we were both competing for gold – but standing next to my brother on the start line for a home Olympics was so special. I remember saying: ‘Let’s go.’
I love Chipotle. And I’m not just saying that. Like, I genuinely am in love with Chipotle.
People keep saying that books will never die out. Well, books may never die out, but hundreds of thousands of individual writers will, and for them, it’s as if books did die out.
I keep saying this, and I truly mean this: I think that when you experience true love, it never really goes away.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say ‘elevator’, we say ‘lift’… they say ‘President’, we say ‘stupid psychopathic git.
True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary.
I have no time for the endless nostalgia: ‘Oh gosh I used to . . . ‘ Life is too short; I don’t have any time for sitting and saying I miss things. What’s the point? Go and do something else.
You can’t build the hyperloop without the government saying, ‘We want this in our country.’ We want to build it the right way.
When Keats says: ‘Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses’, what he means is that we don’t necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.
I’m not confident in social situations; just going up to someone in a bar and saying ‘Hi’ is going to be even more difficult because they won’t know the real me. They will just know me as a fictional person I play on the screen.
I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.
People were always saying how modern players need to be able to play in two or three positions, and those words stuck in my head. I think that I can do just that.
People are saying I don’t need science, I have everything, but everything is based on science.
