Cooking puts me at ease; it gives me control over what’s happening, and I know that the finished product is gonna be good, so I’m gonna be satisfied. That’s kind of how I keep myself grounded.
I wrote and finished the script for ‘Man in the Middle’ two weeks after the September 11 bombing. It’s a very American film about an ex-diplomat based in the Middle East, a leader in the U.S. administration who now sells used cars in the Middle East.
An espionage organization is a collector: it collects raw information. That gets processed by a machinery that is supposed to resolve its reliability, and to present a finished product.
When I read the script of ‘Karu,’ there was a spark within, and I instantly connected with the story. I was emotionally attached to the story. After we finished shooting, I was so attached to the kid who played my daughter, I wanted to adopt her. That’s how strong my emotional attachment was with the role and the story.
When you come to ‘Shark Tank,’ the only person you should listen to is me, because you know you’re getting the truth. I’ll decide if it’s worth it, and after I’m finished, the rest of the people can look into it.
Once at the White House I was asked to conduct the Drum and Bugle Corp. The man just handed me the baton and I finished the song. It was great. I got to keep the baton.
I’m a purist, and I love the sport. I loved the ’60s and ’70s, when the fans even enjoyed the races where only four cars finished, and they were two laps apart.
You have to budget time for the inevitable problems that come up with children. You have to always be ahead of the game. If your proposal is due at NASA on Friday, it has to be finished on Wednesday because, on Thursday, it could be fevers and head lice.
I met some friends in the end of 10th, beginning of 11th, who were in the popular group so I finished off high school in that group and got to see both sides.
As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.
I don’t give up on commitments until what I’ve been asked to do is clearly finished.
I remember so well my father’s complete concentration when he went to the studio. Everything he did, every movement he made, he did with complete concentration. Then, after he had finished work, he would go to the beach or whatever, and then he would enjoy play and forget about his work.
That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer’s commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they’ve finished the program.
The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now.
The most stupid mistake a counter-insurgency operation can make is alienating the population. If you alienate the population, you’re finished.
It is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated… it is finished when it surrenders.
It is fine to be all focused on gymnastics if that is what you want to do, but once you are finished with gymnastics, what are you going to do?
For me, the power of the poetry in ‘Milk and Honey’ is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It’s the emotion you feel once you’ve read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don’t get stuck on every other word, you don’t know what the word means.
I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it’s finished. They say, ‘Where’s the book you were going to write?’ And I say, ‘Forget about it. It doesn’t exist.’
Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I’ve had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I’ll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I’d like to get it finished some day.
I remember that the day I finished ‘The Angels,’ part three of ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’, I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.
The journey matters as much as the destination. By engaging in the moment on set, I’ve stopped rushing and now find pleasure in the collaborative process – the characters, the costumes – rather than worrying about the finished product.
I have a huge note on my phone where things just start popping up. It doesn’t make that much sense to me at the time, but once a song is finished, I can read into it and figure out who the characters are in my life.
Most of my friends – when I was five, six, seven years old – their dads were working in an auto plant in Detroit until 5:30, and then they were sat in rush hour. They weren’t around as much. My dad finished at three o’clock, so he was just around more.
Real socialism is inside man. It wasn’t born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can’t say it is finished.
We knew the European players that went to the NBA and had great careers, and we knew the ones that went and had terrible careers or finished early. We were prepared for a lot of criticism.
At any comic book convention in America, you’ll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.
I just finished Meet Joe Black with Hopkins.
I started by writing short stories, but they weren’t very good; I tried them on various magazines, and none of them was published. People were nicer then about turning you down, and so I didn’t lose heart – I kept on writing and wrote a lot of books, one or two of which I finished, and others I didn’t.
When I was little, my older brother, Gary, was forced to read a book a week in fourth grade. The books he liked he threw on my bed when he was finished with them. This continued throughout my childhood and made me a reader for life.
Everything for me has happened so quickly. I finished shooting ‘The Blind Side’ not this past June, but the June before, and all of sudden up to now, it seems like it’s gone from zero to 60 for me. I feel so fortunate to be able to say that.
Once you start thinking about it in a mercenary frame of mind, then you’re finished. You’re a joke, because there are too many mercenaries out there already.
If I had it to do over, I might have finished school first, then devoted all my time to StumbleUpon instead of dividing my time between the two. In the end, however, it was probably good to take the time I did.
When ‘Games of Thrones’ is finished, I’m not one to go on about it too long and rest on one’s laurels. The stuff that interests me is the work.
I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat – just to get the darned thing finished.
I met the guys through a friend of a friend, and their former drummer had quit. I wasn’t too familiar with the Chili Peppers before that, so I joined at the end of 88′ and we finished recording Mother’s Milk at the end of 89′, next thing I know I’m in Spin with a sock.
Back in 1985, I was working on my third solo album when the band came to me and asked me to produce the next Fleetwood Mac project. At that point, I put aside my solo work – which was half finished – and committed myself for the next seventeen months to producing ‘Tango in the Night.’
I have never been jealous. Not even when my dad finished fifth grade a year before I did.
I find going back through things sometimes exhilarating because I find things I didn’t know I had, and sometimes it’s very off putting because there are things I never quite finished, and there’s nothing at all to do about it now.
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
I’ve redone plays of mine and made changes. A play is a living thing, and I’d never say I wouldn’t rewrite years later. Tennessee Williams did that all the time, and it’s distressing, because I’d like the play to be out there in its finished form.
I love it when someone tries a recipe of mine and posts a picture of the finished product. Completely rewarding. It makes my day every time.
When you retire, no-one remembers that you finished in the top four. They remember you won a trophy.
My grandfather started his autobiography before he died; he never finished it. I would like to finish his autobiography because I finished mine.
When I finished the juniors I felt, perhaps for about a year and a half, that everything was going to be the same and that I would be able to go out there and win any match. But it wasn’t the case. I struggled.
My dad was a really funny, really talented guy who had a great success in a limited audience. But from him, I learned that he always felt the audience was entitled to 150 per cent. If he was performing at an event, he’d keep playing until the last person had finished dancing.
Personality is less a finished product than a transitive process. While it has some stable features, it is at the same time continually undergoing change.
I tend not to look back and dwell on a project once it is finished.
I’ll never forget watching ‘I’m Not There’ with Cate Blanchett, because it was the first time she saw the finished film and saw her performance in it. I was sitting next to her experiencing it vicariously through her fresh eyes and hoping she liked it.
