In college I was so mad I wasn't playing. The two guys in front of me were Billy Volek and David Carr, but I just realized that was a blessing in disguise, that I was so bad and I never played, so my brain's good.

I think if you're good and you can persuade people you're going to be able to do that role and ultimately the audience buys it, then it doesn't matter whether you were really a chimpanzee in disguise! You've done it.

A few years ago, when I had no work and started believing that films weren't a viable career, I thought of finding another job. I started training and riding horses and got consumed by that. It was a boon in disguise.

The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science.

I'm really muscular because my mother had to teach me how to straighten my own spine. It wasn't good for my relationship with her because she was dictatorial about it, but in the end I was able to disguise what I had.

Like the firm handshake and looking people straight in the eye, the blazer had originally been a symbol of trust. Because of this, it had been purloined by the less-than-trustworthy and became their preferred disguise.

I think one's relationship with one's vulnerability is a very delicate and precious relationship. Most people try to hide, disguise that vulnerability, and in doing that, you, I think, diminish a great source of power.

When you're good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.

Growing up poor, I didn't even have a lunch to take to school. Lunch was 26 cents, and we didn't even know what 26 cents looked like. I didn't love school because I wanted to disguise that I was poorer than everybody else.

One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.

I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

If you say, 'I listen to pop,' you picture this kind of perfect, colorful, polished song. I want to have that, but when you open it, you see this gritty dark - kind of like dancing your tears away. Disguise the sadness in a pop beat.

Insight into character comes from listening intently to the spoken word. The physical person, their charisma, charm and dramatic flair is more often used to persuade audiences, as they use these stealth tools of disguise and deception.

I have thick hair which is like Plasticine - it's mouldable. So I'll fashion it into some creation that looks presentable. I often wear it down because I have a tiny head and small face, and my hair adds volume to help disguise my pinhead.

People often say that a bad event is a 'blessing in disguise.' Trust me, experience will teach you that some are unbelievably well disguised. Everyone gets fired, or decides to make a radical change at some point. Everyone suffers setbacks.

The minute your parents die, you stop fighting them. I realized the more I changed my face for films, the more I looked like him. I always liked to disguise myself because I was trying to run away from his image. But all that is not worth it.

I'm always so impressed with these actresses with their perfect make up and hair and sometimes I'm very aware that I'm not like that. But I don't think I can do things any other way. I would be wearing a disguise if I started to apply that stuff.

I am drawn to those parts; I like the tough girls because they are not tough. It's a veil; it's a disguise. It's defenses. At the core, everybody is human, everybody is fragile, everybody is terrified, and the fear is what propels you to be tough.

I don't read anything. I don't read the press. I've always valued my supporters and my haters are supporters in disguise. That's just the way it is. I run a couple of social media accounts and you can't help but look at comments every now and then.

When I write a song, I always start on acoustic guitar, because that's a good test of a song, when it's really open and bare. You can often mislead yourself if you start with computers and samples and programming because you can disguise a bad song.

The point is the 'me' that you see before you is not the 'me' in my private little space, shape-shifting into the writing role, nor is it the 'me' that works with the actors. Here, at the end of the film doing interviews, I feel like I'm in disguise.

I'm an introvert, but I disguise my introversion by being an extrovert. If I don't have to be around people, I'm not. If I'm around people, I'm gonna do my thing. But I'm not really with the fake kickin' it - everything's organic, everything's natural.

My movies are painfully personal, but I'm never trying to let you know how personal they are. It's my job to make it be personal, and also to disguise that so only I or the people who know me know how personal it is. 'Kill Bill' is a very personal movie.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

The president's poking fun at himself over what goes down. I thought it was a good-natured performance. It made him look good. But he certainly doesn't disguise the record on weapons of mass destruction. And you feel like saying to people, Just get over it.

Dad could speak with a strong voice. And luckily, he was very good at lip-reading, so he was able to disguise his deafness well. He tried various hearing aids but would find them fiddly and uncomfortable, and worse, they often made horrible high-pitched noises.

If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.

After 'Student Of The Year,' when I played that baby-doll, diva character, I knew I would be stereotyped, and I wanted to break that image of me. I loved that role, but I don't want to be attached to one particular genre, so 'Highway' was a blessing in disguise.

People think that because you might have a feeling toward another male that you don't enjoy women. I love women. I love being around them. But when we'd go out together, we'd kind of almost go out in disguise. Not in disguise, but in a baseball cap and sunglasses.

Most of us were probably less than immaculately honest as teenagers; it's practically encoded into adolescence that you savor your secrets, dress in disguise, carve out some space for experiments and accidents and all the combustible lab work of becoming who you are.

In 'Hope Never Dies', Biden attempts to disguise himself with a beach look, hoping that the incongruity of it will allow him to snoop around Wilmington without being recognized. Obama, on the other hand, knows the best way to keep a low profile is to just be himself.

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn't really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn't have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

We just compare our lifestyle to movies so you can relate to them. When I say, 'I bought a carpet from Aladdin so I could finesse and do magic,' that means I had to get me a new whip or I had to get me something in disguise to work my magic, to finesse, to get out of here.

I have lived so long among people who do not understand me, been so long accustomed to refrain and disguise myself for fear of being laughed at, that I have grown as difficult to come at as a snail in a shell; and what is worse, I cannot come out of my shell when I wish it.

Trump is a hybrid phenomenon as I see it. He is somewhat like UKIP and Le Pen with his right-wing populism that espouses some fascist overtones, but he's also partly just the old neoliberalism in disguise, especially if we look at some of the people he appointed to his cabinet.

When there's a setback, someone with a fixed mindset will start thinking, 'Maybe I don't have what it takes?' They may get defensive and give up. A hallmark of a successful person is that they persist in the face of obstacle, and often, these obstacles are blessings in disguise.

I got into acting for the chance to be many different people and many different characters. I love hiding in a role and doing the research. If there is an opportunity to change my body, I will change my body. I'll slip in and disguise myself in a role. That is a really big treat for me.

Israeli ingenuity was never more evident than in the Ayalon bullet factory built during the British occupation of Palestine. It was constructed underneath an urban kibbutz. The workers had a bakery and laundry which provided constant clatter to disguise the work carried on below ground.

Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner's writings, but I can't accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.

I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author's intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.

One of the rudest things you can do, food-wise, is to stare at someone in the act of eating. It draws attention to the unseemly fact that eating is a bodily function - like animals, we are trapped by our hungers, but we do our best to disguise them with such civilized props as menus and forks.

I had a blast writing the Ranger in 'The Great Dinosaur Rush' for the Moonstone collection. The story turned out to be twice as long as it was supposed to be, but I was having fun. I even showed the Ranger in his 'old prospector' disguise, and I had some nice exchanges between the Ranger and Tonto.

Disguising your own origins is a deeply American impulse, but that doesn't make it any less compromising. The way I live my life is to try to foreground the tensions and paradoxes of being a white person who's interested in racial justice and reconciliation, rather than disguise or obliterate them.

It's bad if you disguise yourself, I honestly cannot see it anymore when you're after the game, always asked the same questions and give pre-programmed answers. I do not know if there is a solution for that. I don't know if you can, want or should change it. But sometimes I just wish for a little more.

For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman's intelligence was a man's deception.

I became a master of disguise and could play the straight man down to a tee, sometimes over-compensating by getting into fights or being overly aggressive because I didn't want the real me to be found out. So I created this alter ego, knowing full well that I was living in my little fantasy bubble, my shell.

The Transatlantic and Transpacific Trade and Investment Partnerships have nothing to do with free trade. 'Free trade' is used as a disguise to hide the power these agreements give to corporations to use lawsuits to overturn sovereign laws of nations that regulate pollution, food safety, GMOs, and minimum wages.

For some reason, Superman seems to be held to higher standards on the subject of secret/super identities than other superheroes. No one ever says, 'Peter Parker was a nerdy kid. He can't possibly be Spider-Man, attract a good-looking gal, work in a newspaper, etc.' And no one gets hung up on whether his nerdiness is a disguise.

What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.

A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.

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