Everything happens for a reason. Like, I kind of hear people go, ‘Man, you’ve been in a lot of bands.’ Yes, I have. I’ve also been married several times, too, and every time I get into something, I think, ‘This is the one.’ I think that’s just human nature.
You know how you hear people say that they had people in their lives who told them they couldn’t make it or they couldn’t do something? That’s not me. That’s not my story. My brothers have been there with me since day one. We’ve been through everything together – good and bad.
If you’ve earned a position, be proud of it. Don’t hide it. I want to be recognized. When I hear people say, ‘There’s Joan Crawford!’ I turn around and say, ‘Hi! How are you!’
The degree to which you’re peculiar and different is the degree to which you must learn to hear people thinking. Just in self-defense you have to learn, where is their kindness? Where is their danger? Where is their generosity?
People want to see you on the pitch. That was why I left Chelsea. I didn’t want to hear people saying, ‘Hey, he’s doing well in training, blah blah blah… ‘ The game is what counts.
When I hear people flatteringly say, ‘You’re an expert on East Asia…’ I’m certainly an observer of East Asia, and central Asia, and ASEAN, and to a lesser extent South Asia and the Gulf, but there’s always something behind the wall in China.
For myself and the Players Coalition, it was never about the money or having our voices bought. To hear people call me or anyone else a sell-out is insulting. It has always been, and will always be, about lifting the voices of the people and the work of those that fight for them.
You hear people say, ‘Well, I was going to say this, but I knew I couldn’t get through it without crying.’ Well, like, think of all the great things we didn’t hear because of that.
I don’t think people are experiencing superhero fatigue. Do you hear people complaining that there are too many action movies? I think it’s good entertainment.
When I hear people who love my music and are trying to copy it, it sounds strange to me because it sounds so simple, made by other people. It took me a lot of years to find the balance, to find a way to be on the edge of being accessible but at the same time having the echo of a deep, more complex world.
I grew up listening to all kinds of music. When I came up, you would hear people like Marvin Gaye talking about Sarah Vaughan. You would go to a show and see Ella Fitzgerald performing the music of the Beatles.
You can almost hear people saying, ‘We’re going to make a movie about an election’ and ‘We’re going to make a movie about a lobbyist.’ You can hear the yawning start across the nation.
I think talk is cheap – when I hear people say what they’d like to happen, I think it’s empty.
I like to just hear people talking and TV is a quick way to hear different periods and genres. It’s just interesting to me. I’m pretty easily amused with that kind of stuff.
I don’t wish stardom on anyone. When I hear people say, ‘this guy’s a star,’ I always say, ‘good luck.’
More and more, I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who’ve found a distinctive voice. In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his style to really expressionistic places. It’s a real pleasure for me to hear people pushing their craft.
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour, I feel like saying to them: ‘You simply don’t understand – how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?’ But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.
There’s a lot of misunderstanding out there, particularly in the difference between religion and culture. For example, I hear people criticise Islam for arranged marriages, but that’s nothing to do with Islam. It is the culture in some places, but it’s actually against Islam.
We step up and fight the top names that nobody wants to fight. So if I hear people saying, ‘oh, you’re ducking this or ducking that,’ no I haven’t ducked anybody.
I had never considered myself a political guy, but there are certain things I can’t shut up about. When I hear people say things like, ‘If ‘we’ allow gays to marry, then people will want to marry animals and children,’ I can’t just stand there.
Whenever I hear people crying about Kobe yelling at people in practice or wondering whether or not LeBron is best friends with his teammates, I just roll my eyes. You know how many off-court conversations I had with the Zen-Master Phil Jackson in my entire time with the Lakers? One.
Don’t you hear people saying things you can’t believe they’re saying?
You always hear people say that having kids changes everything, but you can’t fully realize it until you have children yourself.
One of my favorite things about making horror movies is, the first time you screen them in front of an audience, it’s very fun to hear people audibly react to the work you put into a movie. You don’t wonder at the end of the movie whether it worked or not.
You might hear people decry the loss of privacy in today’s world, but radical transparency is dramatically reducing violence everywhere. Most violent things happen in the dark when no one’s watching, whether it’s an oppressive dictator or someone causing violence in the inner city.
It’s pretty funny to me when I hear people say, ‘I write six songs every day,’ or, ‘I turn out a song a day.’ I bet you that’s a whole week of bad songs.
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