My mother picked my name with a spiritual intention: Destiny, ‘what was meant to be.’ She was a very special woman, and a gifted witch.
There was so long from when we did the pilot and then when the show was eventually picked up by Comedy Central – and, in fact, we had to shoot the pilot twice.
It really wasn’t about picking Chicago. I feel like Chicago picked me.
Although it’s not something I’m particularly proud of, I’m willing to admit that, in addition to whiling away the long stretches of time in the air and waiting in airport lounges reading the ‘New Yorker’ and ‘New York Times’ on my Kindle, I’ve picked up the occasional tabloid magazine.
In school, all my teachers and my mum were super routing for me to study at Oxford. I picked music as a career choice, and this didn’t sit too well with them!
While I circled around and around in my brown rental skates, I studied a group of skaters spinning in the center. I was fascinated! When my mom picked me up, I began a campaign for skating lessons.
I was so in debt by the end of ‘Dust Devil,’ having picked up the tab personally for the post-production of the movie, and having no way to recoup because I didn’t own the rights to the movie. There was no way I could see any money back on it, so any money spent was just a dead loss.
Acting is a lot of waiting to be picked, and I like to do a lot of things at once. I think I will have to find things that are totally mine. I have so much comfort that school and my academic life are totally mine. I hope that there’s not a lot of idleness in my future.
If you take my stuff apart, you’ll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who’s probably my favourite writer.
My parents couldn’t handle my energy so they enrolled me in every sport the school was offering. I didn’t resent it because I loved sports and picked them up easily.
I was a pretty insecure kid, didn’t have a lot of friends, and was picked on a lot, and music gave me confidence.
One of my favorite memories was one time Prince picked me up and said we were going to Michael Jordan’s birthday party.
If you’re in a motion-capture studio, you have spherical, reflective markers, which are picked up by cameras that emit infrared – it reflects it, and then the cameras pick up the data.
Letters actually work. Even the top dog himself takes time every day to read 10 letters that are picked out by staff. I can tell you that every official that I’ve ever worked with will tell you about the letters they get and what they mean.
When I’d get out of school in the afternoon, I would go to the golf course, and I just picked the game up. And when I was 13 years old, I could shoot 70 – even-par 71, one over par and then something like that. I just took a liking to the game.
One role blends into the next role. I mean, there’s strange idiosyncrasies from roles that I play that I picked up that will never go away.
Ah… romance to me is spontaneity. It’s not diamond earrings; it’s a bunch of daffodils that’s freshly picked from the field.
As actors, if you get a pilot on HBO or on USA, your odds are good that it’s going to get picked up.
I was a slow and lazy reader as a kid. ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ was the only non-school book I would read, over and over, between television, records and radio, until I picked up my aunt’s copy of ‘In Cold Blood’ and she didn’t ask for it back.
There are people who specialise in lettering, and I’ve had my hand lettering made into a digital font. I picked up a copy of the ‘Dandy’ the other week, and I was amazed to see that it was completely lettered in my hand-lettering font. It was quite a thrill, really, having been a ‘Dandy’ reader years and years ago.
‘Pasadena’ erred on the side being too dark. That was probably the one thing about it, in retrospect, why it didn’t get picked up.
When the government picked companies and gave them monopoly rights to frequencies in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, it was picking the winners of the competition; it wasn’t setting the terms of the competition.
I first picked up a camera when I was like 19 because I was unemployed and starting to get bored, and I was like ‘right, what can I do?’ And vlogging was just the thing that was on the rise, so I was like, ‘let’s give that a go,’ and luckily it turned out very well.
I fell asleep during the draft, actually. I woke up, and I was picked No. 48. I didn’t even know what number I was picked.
The funny thing is that making a pilot is sort of an audition, at least for me. There’s something psychological there, where you’re sort of asking for the job while you’re acting. And then when it’s been picked up, it’s a completely different psychological dynamic.
Little kids who get picked on and bullied can relate to the Lucha Dragons, who are smaller, but they’re quick and exciting and never give up.
I picked it up just for relaxation. I can sit down and get into the game and escape that it’s a big game tomorrow, escape that we need a win, or whatever. My wife knows, after a game I get home at 12:30, I’m playing chess till 3 o’clock in the morning.
I used to play tennis growing up and then didn’t play for a good 10 years. I’ve picked up the sport again and I absolutely love it.
I’m writing a novel about two actresses who go to New York, because that’s what I know about. One has lost touch with reality, disappears and is picked up by a man.
In Holland you go into amateur teams, come up through the ranks and are generally spotted for senior or professional football. At 16, I had made it into a men’s amateur team, and was picked up professionally from there.
I always thought that sororities were just made up of cheerleaders from high school. And I kind of picked on those cheerleaders!
Since I first picked up the violin, I’ve been very interested in tone and texture: I would have very visceral reactions to the texture of a snare drum or a pedal steel guitar or a violin.
The Internet has been a great outlet for storytelling. After all, there are web-based shows that have started online and have then gotten picked up. I think it’s a great opportunity for artists to get through the network roadblock. It just allows us another venue to be creative in.
When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.
I was 13 when my parents moved to Israel, and I was put in a Scottish mission school. Ninety-nine percent of the children were Israeli… Suddenly, I found myself speaking the wrong language, dressed in the wrong clothes, picked up by the wrong mode of transportation – an embassy car instead of a bus.
Mayors could never get away with the kind of nonsense that goes on in Washington. In our world, you either picked up the trash or you didn’t. You either moved an abandoned car or you didn’t. You either filled a pothole or you didn’t. That’s what we do every day. And we know how to get this stuff done.
Most of my jewellery is what I picked up in India.
Statistically, I’d say there are about as many gay figure skaters as there are gay football players. The majority are straight. There are just those few exceptions, and those are the ones who have gotten picked on and followed over the years.
And from the first time I picked up a basketball at age eight – I had a lot of difficulty when I first picked up a basketball, because I was a scrub – there were things that I liked about it.
If you got up this morning and had fruits for breakfast, it was probably picked by the bent back of an immigrant worker. If you slept in a hotel or motel of the nation, you probably had your room done by an immigrant worker.
Our goal is not to be the biggest. Our goal is to be the best. That is why the aspiration that I have picked is to be the undisputed leader in professional services, and I’m starting with intangible metrics.
I didn’t have the best relationship with my dad. I was bullied in school, picked on. I remember the first time of just trying to connect with girls. It was just rejection after rejection. So I always felt ugly.
As far as I’m aware, you can’t tell if something is going to be successful. Brilliant scripts often don’t get picked up, and terrible ones do all the time!
Jerry picked up the technique of visualizing the story as a movie scenario; and whenever he gave me a script, I would see it as a screenplay. That was the technique that Jerry used, and I just picked it up.
When me and Eric did songs back in the day, we didn’t go and sit down in front of no A&R. We made our album, and then, when we finished, we handed it in, and then we picked the best song for the first single.
I was picked on as a kid. I had a nose the size of a softball plus braces and acne. It was rough.
I always wanted to do be an allrounder. I don’t know why I picked keeping.
Timbaland was crazy to work with. When he stepped in the studio, it was like working with Morpheus from ‘The Matrix’ – he stepped in with three beats and said, ‘Pick one.’ They all sounded crazy, but I could only pick one. I picked one and he hooked me up.
When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.
