Let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism-the lie that there can be such a thing as men's liberation groups.
I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.
All of my lyrics are based on the one thing that's never failed me, and that's the Word of God.
I don't want to be an actor or nothing but if I have to, I'll act if it's the right thing.
There's no such thing, you know, as picking out the best woman: it's only a question of comparative badness, brother.
The weird thing about this business - and I'm sure this operates in many other things, but it's very present and acute in this business - is that a lot of people don't realize that they have power. Particularly actors.
Don't overplan your life. Joining Google when I was four months pregnant was a bit of a leap, but sometimes you have to do the right thing for you right now.
Even if America entered the war, it is improbable that the Allied armies could invade Europe and overwhelm the Axis powers. But one thing is certain. If England can draw this country into the war, she can shift to our shoulders a large portion of the responsibility for waging it and for paying its cost.
The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.
Almost the first thing I did when I became ill was to buy a truly good television set.
The thing about hip-hop is that it's from the underground, ideas from the underbelly, from people who have mostly been locked out, who have not been recognized.
It is a sort of great Victorian truth that actually, trying to do the right thing is pretty good for you and pretty good for business as well, by and large.
I used to try and make up visually for what I couldn't play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where, in order just to make one chord more lethal, I'd make it a really lethal looking thing, whereas really it's just going to be picked normally.
A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.
I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.
We fear the thing we want the most.
We might imagine that Jesus had many human faults. He failed most humanly, in my reckoning, when he killed the fig tree just because it didn't bear any figs for his breakfast; that was a disgraceful, bad-tempered thing to do, and to try and make a virtue of it by saying it was a demonstration of faith only made things worse.
One thing most people would agree is that climate change would add further uncertainties to our already quite tight water supply situation in China.
I always think that I'm the best thing in a lot of bad movies. Personally, I have to. I think that I like me as an actor.
The single most exciting thing that happened for me was getting to spend some time in the studio with both Marty Stuart and Vince Gill.
Everything is expressed through relationship. Colour can exist only through other colours, dimension through other dimensions, position through other positions that oppose them. That is why I regard relationship as the principal thing.
Everyone calls himself a friend, but only a fool relies on it; nothing is commoner than the name, nothing rarer than the thing.
In the past, whistleblowers have had their desks moved to break rooms, broom closets, and basements. It's a clever punishment, good-government activists say, that exploits a gray area in the law. The whole thing can look minor on paper. They moved your office. So what?
I don't really know what to say about Izzy. It's like you could have a conversation and think it's one way, and the next day, it's another way. And I'm not trying to take any shots at Izzy. It's just his thing is kind of his thing, whatever that is.
Every time somebody tries to go in and reinvent what we do, it always ends up being more about technology and sets, and flash and dash, forgetting the main thing, which is interesting people saying interesting, important things.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
I made a supreme effort not to do that thing that parents do, which is to bore people without children to death by going on and on about how funny their children are, so there's none of that hopefully.
And then a great thing in my life was going to India.
The thing about imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, there must be some truth in one's own imagination.
The last thing, and the only one that you cannot physically train for, is the psychological preparation.
The thing that separates a so-so director and a great director is a love and caring for film.
In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.
Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing.
But, Eminem... No, I've loved rap for a long time, especially when it got out of its first period and became this gangsta rap, ya know this heavy rap thing? That's when I started to fall in love with it. I loved the lyrics. I loved the beat.
I realized I had a novel on my hands, but didn't know where it was going to go. So I thought, 'I'm going to do everything that you're not supposed to do when you plan a novel; I'm going to step back and let this thing take itself wherever it wants to go, and I'm not going to worry about how things connect until later on.'
If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you'll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.
