Quotes on Like

I was raised in a sort of village. I have a huge family, and I think there is strength in that. It helped me to deal with some of the complications of living in the South because I always felt like I belonged, no matter what.

My only advice is to try to get the job that's most like the job you want, rather than the one that's more prestigious. Always try to be the talent.

I am so happy to be alive. That's the one thing I'd like for people to know. Sometimes people walk by and slip up and say the wrong thing about me, and I'll smile. They wonder why am I smiling. Because I'm happy that I'm alive.

And it was the idea that you can do a play - like a Shakespeare play, or any well-written play, Arthur Miller, whatever - and say things you could never imagine saying, never imagine thinking in your own life.

You cannot be an actor like I am and not have been in some of the worst movies like I have. But I stand before you deeply honored, mighty grateful and just plain gobsmacked.

Some people do really find fault like there's a reward for it.

To see queer people keeping each other down makes me so sad because I've been around for a long time - I've seen the people who came before us fight for what we have right now, and they did not fight like that for us to go backwards.

How many times have we seen reality celebrities fall from grace - often through no fault of their own - and then go on a show like 'Celebrity Big Brother' and say, 'I want to show the public a different side of me.' And I'm screaming at the telly going, 'This is not therapy. This is voyeurism!'

I was 14 when I placed a bet on Muhammad Ali to beat Joe Frazier in their first fight. There was something magical about Ali, like the first time I heard Ray Charles sing 'America The Beautiful' or Louie Armstrong blow the trumpet - feeling as if they could influence the cosmos, make anything right when they performed.

How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

The way I go about it is that we should all be inviting people into our lives who don't look like us, speak like us and don't come from where we come from.

Economically as well as emotionally, modern marriage has become like an affluent gated community. It has become harder for low-income Americans to enter and sustain.

Everybody's career has ups and downs. I like to take chances; I don't like to stand still. And I don't give a damn what the market is interested in; I want to try things.

I don't feel that no big stone should be put over my head, saying he did this, he did that. Unless there's something that I really did do. I believe I'm just ordinary. And I'd like for people to think of me that way, as just a guy that tried. Wanted to be loved by other people because he loved people.

When you have those two languages - an analytic one like English and a synthetic, very sensual thing like Russian, you get almost a psychotic sense of humanity that permeates nearly everything. It can help you understand, and it can discourage you, because you see how little can be done.

I have seen American determination in people like Debbi Sommers. She runs a furniture rental business for conventions in Las Vegas. When 9/11 hit, and again, when the recession tanked the conventions business, she didn't give up, close down, or lay off her people. She taught them not just to rent furniture, but also to manufacture it.

A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

Access to public facilities like bathrooms is important for transgender people. But the fight for transgender rights does not begin and end at the bathroom door.

For me, having a gender identity that was different from my sex assigned at birth and that wasn't seen by society felt like a constant feeling of homesickness - that unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach.