Quotes on Things

It wasn't books that inspired me to write. For me, inspiration was simple, immediate: I got it from eating, dancing, talking. I got it from life lived, things touched, from sensuality, from love of life, from our irrefutable connection to the earth.

The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.

With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That's the upside to things getting challenging.

It's not the way I threw the football - it's not particular games that I won - but that they remember that here's a guy that believed, that worked hard. Although things didn't always go in his favor, he continued to press through, and with his faith in himself and his faith in God, he was able to accomplish great things.

Wherever and whenever I sing, if there is only one spiritual on a program, people will talk about two things afterward, and one of them will be the spiritual. What I bring to this is the best of my classical training - not all of it. I apply what is appropriate.

It's such a potent thing, to be a kid. We grow up, and we don't want to remember how everything is so beautiful and terrifying when we're young. The older you get, the more you hope to muffle things.

I was raised never to carp about things and never to moan, because in vaudeville, which is my background, you just got on with it through all kinds of adversities.

All bad things are exaggerated in the middle of the night. When you lie awake, you only think of bad things.

When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.

If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.

One of the things I've told men over and over and over and over is if you're being rejected by all the women that you approach, it's not the women!

That's another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it's as if things were coming together in my mind. It's like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it's it's like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.

People looked at my early pictures and called them the most disgusting things ever, and now 'Hairspray' is being done at every school in Britain and America.

One of the things non-aboriginal Canadians learned from aboriginal people over the last 400 years is you don't have to be one thing. That's a European idea. There's multiple personalities, multiple loyalties. You can be a Winnipegger, a Manitoban, a Westerner.

I know in war good people can feel obliged for good reasons to do things they would normally object to and recoil from.

I'm not a classical player. I don't want to be a classical player. I love to improvise, because things happen that never happen anywhere else.

I think I'm in the same mood as ever, but in some ways more mature. I guess you could say that, at 65, when you've seen the world shape up as I have, there are only two things you can do: laugh or kill yourself.

We need some creative tension; people crying out for the things they want.

One of the things you learn as an actor is that human beings are capable of almost anything. I'm sort of in the business of illustrating that fact.