Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
New York City is a living organism; It evolves, it devolves, it fluctuates as a living organism. So my relationship with New York City is as vitriolic as the relationship with myself and with any other human being which means that it changes every millisecond, that it's in constant fluctuation.
I still don't feel I know Hitchcock at all. I find that the more one looks, the more elusive he becomes. But my admiration for Hitchcock the filmmaker remains undiminished. He is a giant of the cinema and the darkness in him informs his cinematic language. You can't separate one from the other.
To be honest, I'm not even thinking about America. If I was to start thinking about the enormity of 'Downton' and the size of the project, then I wouldn't be able to be very truthful to the work. I would start to watch myself too much. I'm not even thinking about it. Who knows what will happen.
When I was a television broadcasting student in 1993 up in Ottawa, Canada, and my friends and I started making a show, I consciously set out to apply comedy to technology. I started tomgreen.com back in 1994, and we weren't able to put video on there yet, but we were aware that that was coming.
I hadn't worked for a year when I had my Prison Break audition and it was the easiest audition I've ever had. I got the script on Friday, went to the audition on Monday and got the part on Tuesday. I was shooting the pilot a week later. I didn't have time to be nervous - it happened so quickly.
People are always going to find fault with anything you do, any process that you're a part of. The creative process means taking risks, I've taken risks and I've made mistakes, but the bottom line is, could anyone else have done any better ? I have to believe that what I created was worthwhile.
If scientists could communicate more in their own voices - in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary - would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?
I've had that experience many, many, times - when you don't get roles. I'd developed a good muscle for shaking it off. I buy myself a present whenever I don't get a role that I really wanted. You get bummed out, and then you go, 'Oh! Now I get to go buy a present for myself.' That kind of helps.
When we were shooting in Shreveport, me and a couple of friends went down to Lafayette, because they had a big Zydeco music festival down there. We spent two days dancing to Zydeco music, eating fried alligator... It was one of the craziest festivals I've ever been to in my life, but I loved it.
As an actor, you generally don’t get to choose what projects you are part of, so I’ve been very fortunate that The Book of Mormon was something I got to be part of. I don’t want to be lofty, but it was groundbreaking, in many ways, for musical theater, so that was really thrilling to be part of.
There's a way of doing comedy that feels true to the person doing it, that doesn't feel like clown-work or silly faces and antics, but that feels real - like you're playing a real person who has real thoughts and feelings, and it's very grounded. I started to watch all comedy through that prism.
I like being what the girls call MOD-"my other Dad." What I've learned in the past year is that every kid is different. But as long as you love them and never forget that love, then you have the key. I think it's all about just being there and loving them because kids feel that every single day.
Consider the rose...The rose is the sweetest smelling flower of all, and it's the most beautiful because it's the most simple, right? But sometimes, you got to clip the rose. You got to cut the rose back, so something sweeter smelling and stronger, and even more beautiful, will grow in its place
I'm always dealing with this sadness. I don't want to be Morrissey or anything, but it is a thing I deal with it. Every day, when I wake up, I have to make a decision to fight this depression. That sounds horrible but I'm fine with it; it's who I am; it's my life. I try not to let it cripple me.
I look at my kids and I feel I'm at the precipice of this job, like just kind of tipping over the other side. I'm very conscious of time I guess is what I want to say, and I want to be there as long as I can with my kids, and I also want to make sure I do all the things that are important to me.
Winston was a bit of a challenge, all right, from a lot of different perspectives. It wasn't just the culture or the class divide or the historical baggage - it was also the age difference. We had to see if I could be aged-up legitimately, without it becoming some sort of hokey acting challenge.
You can't criticize Bob Dylan's singing. You have to respect Billy Joel as a brilliant poet. You can't tell me there's a better rock band ever than Led Zeppelin. And if you speak during the Eagles' "Last Resort," we're done. I'm just asking for seven minutes. This stuff really matters, you know.
I really love to act; I love everything about it. I've never had this addiction to being known. I mean, sure, if you go into acting, there's part of you that is saying, 'I want attention' but I was brought up to work to deserve attention, and it is the work, not the trappings that are important.
There's always a level where you think you can improve and do better. Certainly at the beginning... I did four years of straight theater without ever having a part in a movie, and I remember being far more nervous on a film set than I was on the stage. It took a while for that to become less so.
Hollywood seems to succumb to fads. Well, action films do well. Give me violence. Give me a scene where there's a couple of car chases or shooting and stuff like that. They're forgetting the fact that there's a basic structure to a story that is essential to making it really broad and appealing.
When I started in the theater, the joy for me was playing different parts, and I get set alight by different people and different worlds. The biggest joy for me is jumping around and going from that to this to that, never feeling that I'm any one thing - because I'm not, and we as people aren't.
What's amazing is that I'm recognized all over the world through 'Red Dwarf.' British fans are exceptional, but the American fans are something else. Some of them fly 500 miles to stand in line for three hours, just to meet me, then when they do they collapse. It makes you feel like a rock star!
The great thing about a name like 'Cougar Town' is that you hear it once and you remember it forever. It's a very 'loud' title. But there's a connection to the word 'cougar' that means a lot of people are going to be turned off right away by the title alone without even giving the show a chance.
Who is the person in my life for whom my presence allowing them to have a true second chance, allowing them to have an authentic relationship, who is the person for whom if I do that, their life can be changed for the better? That's something we can do right now with the people right next to us.
Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.
My experience growing up in London and growing up in a working class background, is that when people are down and out, that's when they're probably the funniest. They have to be. That's what they do to cope, to find joy, cause they don't feel the joy inside. Or they use humor to keep people out.
My experience growing up in London and growing up in a working class background is that when people are down and out, that's when they're probably the funniest. They have to be. That's what they do to cope, to find joy, 'cause they don't feel the joy inside. Or they use humor to keep people out.
I started on television, and on sitcoms, and loved them, but then they sort of seemed to be going through sort of an ice age, and they started dying off one by one, and I recognized that, and my representatives recognized that, and we said 'Well, let's look at dramas and other things like that.'
"Yeah, well, if you eat red meat, it stays in your colon for fifteen years!" Good! I paid for it; I want it in my ass, okay? I want them to find a meat sweater from my esophagus to my asshole when they open me up in the end! "This guy's covered in meat! He's Meat-Man! He's Meat-Tracheotomy-Man!"
I think it was 1987 - something like that - or '86, and I thought, 'When you go equity and you're gonna get paid, you'll finally be able to make a living.' But it was not to be so. I always bartended and waited tables so I ended up not doing theater for about a year because nobody would hire me.
In fact, someone was telling me that Gladiator was the one film where Ridley Scott didn't take a producer's credit. And it won. But this guy changed the industry twice; with Aliens which was a whole new way of looking at things and Blade Runner that was also a whole new way of looking at things.
I found out about it probably 9 - 10 months before we shot the film [Don't Kill It] because it was postponed a couple of times, which was actually a good thing because once it all finally came together, I had to get in there and roll off different pages of dialogue and monologues pretty quickly.
I think the violence is important. It all depends on the genre. Rambo was ultra-violent, and I think it worked. You have to give Stallone credit. You have to respect him for taking that shot, and taking the violence all the way. He was the first one to do that in a long time. It fricking worked.
The people in Iraq lived essentially good lives. They had brilliant health and education systems. Saddam actually created an incredible infrastructure in a very difficult country, but they were a Mafia family. If you said anything against that regime or that family you would be killed instantly.
For me, the challenge of a period film is that, unlike a contemporary film where the character can be very free-form when it comes to the acting, there's a burden to acting in a period film because you have to stay within the character's historical background and the gestures of certain periods.
Mike Leigh taught me about making choices - as an actor, you choose between being honest and clever, and with Mike, it's always about being honest. I learned how to behave on a film set from Jim Broadbent. He was a great example of someone with a fantastic career who kept his feet on the ground.
The truth is not a bidimensional thing; it's not flat. It's rounded; it's like a sphere, so there's always a hidden face. There's one that is revealed because there's light reflecting on it, but there's always a hidden one, and once you go around to see the hidden one, it moves, and that's life.
To me, the best part of coming up in that, kind of the last era before it went that way with the FCWs or NXTs, kind of the farm system, is that, you know, wrestling Jimmy Valiant in front of 10 people in Cleveland. We didn't touch. I think we did two things, but we were out there for 20 minutes.
My mother missed having dinner with Lyndon Johnson because she couldn't find the right hat to wear. While my father went off to the white house to break bread with the President, my mother, who's not a things and stuff person, stayed at the hotel and tried on 10 different hats and missed dinner.
Doing things like playing music, something that's so natural and basic to human function, running around in nature, eating delicious food. These things are intrinsic in basic, primordial to human beings, so that's sort of a way to return to a blank canvas, allowing my true personality to return.
I'm trying to grow more limbs in order to multitask at a greater rate and I'm also investigating the possibilities of cloning. Because nothing would be more useful than having multiples of me, and that way, I could do all of the things I'd like to do in the short amount of time we all have here.
Doing theater anywhere, especially in L.A., is a constant uphill battle, and there's also the unsexy parts of the business that you're faced with, like getting money. It's a really great thing to do. You feel like you're really an artist when you're doing that and you're in a company of artists.
I wanted to be an actor from a young age, but actually becoming one and seen the ugly side of the world does feel different and sometimes unwelcome. There are shallow, vapid, untalented people zombieing the streets of Hollywood, adding decadence and immorality to an already extravagant business.
I think about growing up back in Philly. It was about friendship with the guys and having a distant crush on some gal. And when you finally got the nerve to take her out on a date, you went to her parents' house with a shine on your shoes, took her to the movies, and got her home nice and early.
When I first started going to Portland, people told me about Stumptown. They were like 'Oh, it's the best coffee,'and I thought, 'How good could it really be?' I'm like, 'Sure, great, uh... I'd love to see it.' But then when I went, it truly, I am not kidding, is the best coffee I have ever had.
I grew up in the '70s and in Los Angeles during the new blockbuster era. 'Star Wars' was the first film that I saw in the movie theater. I wanted to be an actor; then it turned out to be this 'Wizard of Oz' story: I was 10 or 11 years old, and it turned into something that I didn't think it was.
Comedy is very disarming. It's a way to talk about things and still be light-hearted. And when it's done really well, you never see the strings, whereas when you watch an infomercial or a politician speaking, a lot of times you can see the strings, you can see what agenda they're trying to push.
It was not my destiny, I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn't care what people thought ... It was only boring old men who would ask me. And whenever they went, 'What? No children? Well, you'd better get on with it, old girl,' I'd say 'No! F*** off!'
An author should be delighted, not annoyed when he hears himself persistently misquoted. He could receive no higher compliment. It proves that the world has frequent and urgent need of his thoughts and will rather change the manner in which he expresses them than do without the things expressed.
I wanted to be on American TV so much. I didn't park DJ'ing; I just sort of ended up becoming more of a studio guy. I had a bit more money and I could buy every little piece of equipment and drum machine that had just come out - I've got quite a collection now - and I continued to collect music.