Quotes on ID

The sad truth is, there's more Walter White in me than I'd care to admit, because if I truly was as kind as people think I am, I wouldn't be able to write Walter White.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

So, for instance, if you came to me, I'd ask, 'Do you want to write? Do you want to improvise? Why do you want to play this instrument? What do you want to do?'

I realize that although I'd like to make films as a career after I'm done playing, I really love basketball; I really love my career, an opportunity to compete every day and to push myself physically, mentally and emotionally.

From the age of 15 to 50, I'd hardly stepped out of a kitchen. I just wanted to live a little, to spend time with my wife and children. The first time I saw snow was when I was 50, because I'd never had the time before.

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

I'd rather have just one person who reads and feels my work deeply than hundreds of thousands who read it but don't really care about.

From a technical viewpoint, I have certain things I'd like to present in my solos. To do this, I have to get the right material. It has to swing, and it has to be varied.

For a long time, I'd work until 10 or 11. When I work, I'm on. I'm 'Magic.' I love it, but it takes a lot out of me.

The main purpose of engaging in conversation can no longer be personal advancement or respectability. Instead, I'd like for us to use conversations to create equality, to open ourselves to strangers, and, most practically, to remake our working world.

Music was never just a hobby for me. I'd pick up a guitar every day to work on whatever I was writing at the time. I would put my ideas in songs the way some people might put them in diaries or journals.

Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I'd try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.

When I was eight, my piano teacher played seven or eight notes, and I sang them. She stopped and looked at me in shock! That was the first time I'd gotten that reaction. I'd had looks of horror, but never shock in a positive way.

I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.

If I'd won every single race and got pole everywhere, that would just be boring. It would suck. Where's the fun in that?

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it. I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used. I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing.

I'd done all the things I thought a person had to do in order to be successful and fulfilled, like getting a great education and becoming a lawyer, and yet there was zero spark in my life. But there was no light-bulb moment. It was gradual. In the early 1990s, I decided to experiment and try some new ways of living.

Were I a cloud I'd gather My skirts up in the air, And fly well know whither, And rest I well know where.

I'd spend every summer in Longview on my grandfather's farm. It was a tiny little town divided by a river, which was the segregation line: that side white, this side black. And meanwhile, I lived in Compton - basically, another whole world sealed into 10 square blocks. It's interesting how insular an environment can be.

I'd love to tell actors about all the things they don't need to worry about. Less is more. If you have it inside, you don't need to show too much. People pick up on things.