Quotes on First

It's true that no policy fully survives first contact. But if you don't spend time anticipating the shots you are likely to take, you wind up flailing about wildly.

When I provided the disembodied arm as the logo for 'The Man With the Golden Arm,' it was the first time an advertising-publicity campaign was based on a single symbol. Until then film companies used a variety of symbols and photographs to cover all bets. The concept of using one logo was mine and Otto Preminger's.

When I won the first Grammy, there was no other feeling like that feeling. It just made me feel like I came so far, like that was just a dream a few years before that, and then it was happening right then.

I was destined to work with dying patients. I had no choice when I encountered my first AIDS patient. I felt called to travel some 250,000 miles each year to hold workshops that helped people cope with the most painful aspects of life, death and the transition between the two.

Music from my fourth year began to be the first of my youthful occupations. Thus early acquainted with the gracious muse who tuned my soul to pure harmonies, I became fond of her, and, as it often seemed to me, she of me.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college - the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes - the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That's what America is about.

We're never going to come to a moment where all of us who claim to be feminists can agree about what the first priority of feminism is.

I hope and expect there are female coaches out there who are saying they want to do what I do, and if I can play a part in that and when I step away from the game can say 'I was the first,' then I'm proud of that too.

The most moving responses I got to my coming out in the first place was people, like teenagers, letting me know that it made their lives easier in some way.

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'

People cannot change their tidying habits without first changing their way of thinking.

Learning to read, for the brain, is a lot like an amateur ringmaster first learning how to organise a three-ring circus. He wants to begin individually and then synchronise all the performances. It only happens after all the separate acts are learned and practised long and well.

In architecture you should live for 150 years, because you have to learn in the first 75 years.

Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I've been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong, it matters much more than if a British person gets it wrong. I find it intimidating.

A fact is like a sack - it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

Christianity is not about the divine becoming human so much as it is about the human becoming divine. That is a paradigm shift of the first order.

People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.

When I first started, my songs were the politics of anger. As I got older and hopefully wiser, I wanted to be part of the politics of answers.

A player is not going to get minutes just to get minutes. You have to impact winning, you have to put the team first.

When I read about young designers selling 51 percent of their company to someone else, I cringe. I want to say, 'Don't do it - call me first.'