Luckily, I was raised by people who’d already seen all the yuck stuff, which is why they originally didn’t want me to act. I understood the difference between getting a part at a Hollywood party and getting a job.
This is what Steve Jobs understood: Brands are defined not by the best thing on the product but by the worst thing.
I’m on record as being understood to be a supporter of a reformed establishment, in which other Christian denominations, and other faiths, play a major part.
Walt understood all of those things, and even common things about people. For instance: Usually you get your idea of what kind of day it is by looking at the horizon, because the horizon is your eye level. So what Walt did is to eliminate the horizon.
For the last 10 years, I’ve felt increasing pressure to stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I’ve never understood why. It’s cheaper to work on film, it’s far better looking, it’s the technology that’s been known and understood for a hundred years, and it’s extremely reliable.
If my parents really understood how much I’ve learned that I could never learn in school, they’d be very proud. Instead, I’m still their crazy kid, sagging his pants and dancing around on the laptop.
I think the point to be understood is that we’re all different. I’ve never been a fan of theories of acting. I didn’t go to drama school, so I was never put through a training that was limited by someone saying, ‘This is the way you should act.’
Rules must be established and enforced, and, as numbers are increased in prisons, the necessity for vigilance increases. These rules, let it be understood, may be kindly while firmly enforced. I would never suffer any exhibition of ill-temper or an arbitrary exercise of authority.
Time, presence and physical attentiveness are our most basic proxies for something ultimately unprovable: that we are understood.
I’ve always understood that, as a woman and as a person of color, I would always have to work harder; I would have to have thicker skin. I would have to be more mindful of my reactions, the way I spoke to people.
Somebody once said to me, ‘If you want to be understood, don’t write fiction.’
For if the mystery concealed of old is made manifest to the Apostles through the prophetic writings, and if the prophets, being wise men, understood what proceeded from their own mouths, then the prophets knew what was made manifest to the Apostles.
Miles Davis was a master. In every phase of his career, he understood that this music was a tribute to the African muse.
As an actor, I was a fantastic rebel. Then I became a directorial rebel and understood rebels from both sides. So now I am a friend who gives advice – not one who knows more, necessarily, but who shares ideas.
I am not looking to be understood or liked. Like me or not, I don’t care. I am an outsider, that is the way I was brought up.
My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
From an early age, I understood the concept that, if you’re not the star, then your job is to not pull attention away from the star.
I’m a tomboy now. I always wanted to fit in with my brother’s group, so I climbed trees and played with lead soldiers. But I’m a woman’s woman. I never understood women who don’t have woman friends.
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
The Framers of the Constitution wisely understood that constitutional principles must not be sacrificed on the altar of political appeasement.
The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.
I saw a ’60 Minutes’ piece on Google as a place to work. It was such a foreign concept from what I understood as a regular job. There’s free food, sleeping pods, Ping-Pong. I’m the kind of guy who likes to get involved in everything – I’d be all over the Ping-Pong.
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.
I grew up in this era where your parents’ friends were all called aunt and uncle. And then I had an aunt and an aunt. We saw them on holidays and other times. We never talked about it, but I just understood that they were a couple.
I had problems getting my words out. If people spoke directly to me, I understood what they said. But when the grownups got to yakking really fast by themselves, it just sounded like ‘oi oi.’ I thought grownups had a separate language. I’ve now figured out I was not hearing the hard consonant sounds.
Only if we accept the proposition that the state of Israel is the exclusive and legitimate representative of the Jewish people would a movement calling for divestment, sanctions and boycott against that state be understood as directed against the Jewish people as a whole.
All men and women need a roof over their heads and need to be fed and have proper health care. I don’t know that I believed that, or even understood that, in the early days.
I also wanted to do something that I hadn’t really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.
I understood that I was not the best director in the world nor the worst director in the world. I realized that there is a very mysterious element to what works and what doesn’t work in the theater. And it’s good to know that from the beginning.
In principle, if you understood the mechanisms of keeping things repaired, you could keep things going indefinitely.
What I found particularly fascinating and satisfying about the Hindu tradition was its spirit of inclusiveness. In Sanatan Dharma, or what is commonly called Hinduism, I discovered the basic truths of all religions in a way that the oneness of God and religion is comprehensively understood.
Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
Force me to choose my best book, and I always come back to ‘Gorilla.’ It was the first time I felt I understood what picture books could do.
I grew so depressed from the lack of support that I considered quitting. No one understood me.
If you’re writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you’re reading a poem that’s written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you’re not going to see the thing whole in the song. You’re going to hear it in series, and you can’t skip back.
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
It wasn’t until the Apple Macintosh that people understood what true hardware-software integration was about. It took one company to line it up: low-cost hardware, cool graphics, third-party products built on top of it, in an all-in-one attractive package that was accessible to consumer marketing.
Robin had always wanted to go solo, so when it happened I wasn’t angry at all. I understood the situation. But Barry is so full of pride and couldn’t understand why Robin had done it.
I have never understood models. I find it really hard to find beauty in that or to discover beauty because the beauty was so obvious.
When I brought ‘El Topo’ to New York, no one understood the picture. But John Lennon understood. John and Yoko Ono, they presented ‘El Topo’ in the United States; they introduced it.
Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don’t think the press has understood me.
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.
The foregoing considerations lead us to the very important conclusion, that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly understood, does not exist, and is, in fact, philosophically inconceivable.
After ‘Rent,’ I tried to make a record, and it didn’t work out, and it was the Broadway community that welcomed me back. It’s where I feel the most understood, most at home.
Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots – yet couldn’t understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her.
Conservatives and liberals understand the Christian faith as a set of ideas because, so understood, Christianity seems to be a set of beliefs assessable to anyone upon reflection.
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.
The funniest thing is I never understood why actors were so shady about who they’re dating. Then I realized the things you say get printed and the people you’re involved with read them. That’s what’s tricky. Nothing goes unnoticed. I don’t want to get myself in trouble!
