Quotes on Personal

The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.

Anybody that creates anything is just creating new compositions of things that have existed before. We're all creating something, we're all creating our own personal works of art in ourselves.

People have more freedom to bring more of their personal qualities into the role they play once they have established themselves and their competence is no longer in question. But this is always within limits.

There is something very unsettling about being with someone when they die. People say it's peaceful. It's not peaceful. It's the most personal thing you can do, is die, and you feel almost like you're invading someone's most personal moment by being there.

When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical.

Everyone is tearing each other apart in the name of their personal god. And the irony is, by definition, they're probably worshiping the same god.

Maybe you are homophobic a little bit, but then you see me, and you've always loved me, and you love the way I play, and your kids love me. And then you're like, 'Oh, that's OK. It's fine.' Once it gets a little bit more personal, it helps break down those barriers.

I'm a pretty open book, so not being out publicly felt inauthentic. Hopefully we can get to a point where your personal life isn't anybody else's business, but until then, it's less about people having to know about your sexuality than standing up for what's right and fighting for equality.

If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.

My personal aesthetic is to be affected directly by everything about what you're seeing... I don't mind being dashed on the rocks... My most base act of defiance is to live a long time and still rock.

I'm first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can't say why I'm one.

Confidence comes in going on personal journeys in a public arena and feeling as though you have a right to do that. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you need to discover and not worry about how pretty the journey is. If you're aware of the pretty, you're not going to dig into the mess.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

I believe that in the pursuit of education, individual desire is more influential than institution, and personal faith more forceful than faculty.

We are looking for a set of personal characteristics that predict success, the first and foremost of which is perseverance in the face of challenges. We also look for the ability to influence and motivate others who share your values, strong problem-solving ability, and leadership.

Everything I do is personal. I have never made a movie that didn't have very strong personal resonance.

The fears you do not face become your walls. Most people in business, and in their personal lives, design everything so they can avoid doing what makes them feel uncomfortable. Yet any good business person knows we are not only paid to work, but also we are paid to be scared.

To be white in America is to assume, with total self-confidence and little afterthought, the personal ownership of public spaces.

I think plays have nothing to do with one's own personal life. Not in my experience, anyway. The stuff of drama has to do, not with your subject matter, anyway, but with how you treat it. Drama includes pain, loss, regret - that's what drama is about!

I get vested in my guys. I want to know who their family members are, I want to know their interests, I want to know what makes them tick. I want them to also know I care about the other side of them, their personal character and growth as men, because I think we all sharpen each other that way.

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.