Quotes on Something

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling.

You'd be surprised. Drummers ape each other. The way every rock n' roll record sounds like something else but not all together. Everything other drummers play, if you're playing drums, they all hear.

I learn something new every game. Every game is always different, no matter how you try and think about it beforehand.

And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

When I hear stories about the number of kids that have been lost to violence, where families grow up teaching kids 'duck and cover' long before they learn their ABC's or their colors, I know there is something profoundly wrong in our city.

The notion that religion can actually be something... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church.

I really hate relaxing. I've done three movies in a row, worked for two years straight, and to me, idle time is the devil's workshop. I like to focus on something.

Ironically, when a bunch of very smart people are sitting around a table for hours trying to figure out whether they should do something, that tends to not necessarily lead to the best results.

What I enjoy most is doing something I've never done before.

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.

My secret ambition was always to provide music for animation films: something with an Indian theme, either a fairy tale or mythological tale or on the Krishna theme. I still have a very deep desire, but these sorts of chances don't always come.

The meaning of a theater event is that none of us could see something so clearly as with the new energy that is brought with the meeting of a theme, actors living it, and an audience gradually entering it to live it with them. At that moment, a certain light appears, revealing what we would never have thought of on our own.

I used to think there was something dirty about being paid for something which is a sacred thing to do. I can't disconnect the act of writing music from the act of prayer. If anyone tries to stop me working, it feels like someone is trying to stop me from taking communion.

The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.

Reruns are wonderful because it usually indicates that they had something going for them to begin with and that's why you're still looking at them. And in both my shows, The Dick Van Dyke Show and the last one, they were so well written and so good they hold up.

The Latin root of the word 'politics' means 'of the people.' Politics is about something bigger than electoral politics; in that sense, I feel like I'm already involved.

It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.

The whole Lower Ninth Ward hasn't really recovered, but I feel a good spirit in my heart that something is going on - music is coming back slowly.

I'm a satirist, so I've got boxing gloves on if the person is worthy of satire. But I'm not an assassin. If that ever happens, it's only because something happened during the interview that got me going, and then I had to translate my feelings to the mouth of the character.

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.