I think that Ionesco's greatest weapon is that he's able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls.
He traveled in order to come home.
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
Now, I was on drugs, and that didn't help a whole lot. He hated that. That was part of where Chet and I had problems, so I take complete blame for that.
Just a few months ago in the Republican primary Mitt Romney said to his opponents, who he was crushing at the time, stop whining. And I think that's a good message for the Romney campaign. Instead of whining about what the Obama campaign is saying, why don't you just put the facts out there and let people decide rather than trying to hide them.
The old man sold beer after hours on weekends. And that was something that he probably did to top up his earnings as a truck driver. Mum was the traditional housewife. Loving, caring, sharing - always the keynotes of the family.
Thoughts would go in and out of my mind, but I didn't want to believe that he could have done it.
It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
My first-ever concert was the Barney concert when I was, like, six. My mum took me because I was obsessed with Barney. Barney was actually my first crush... He's, like, literally better than all the guys in the whole world.
I wrote as a very angry young man, believing he was going to be killed in a world war.
Ordinarily if an actor gets chosen for the lead in a film, he or she has already built up a repertoire, and everyone knows what he or she is capable of.
Will Ferrell makes me laugh a lot when he gets out there and gets crazy.
And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.
I absolutely loved working with Tim Burton because he is just a creative, outside of the box thinker. How he does things is fantastic. It is different - weird different - and he does things that are groundbreaking. They are courageous to do and once you do them you are like, 'Wow! That really does work!'
There was a time I desperately needed for the world to know that I was no category guy. My whole goal in life was to reach that certain success where people will say, 'Hey, that guy can do anything. He's the Evel Knievel of music. He's jumping over 15 buses!'
He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'
A true lover always feels in debt to the one he loves.
People always say things like, Oh, well, he was suffering so much that he was better off dying. But that's not true. You're always better off living.
I became a sales manager at Digital Equipment, promoted from within the sales team. My peers were less than excited that I had gotten the job, especially one of my male peers who said he just wasn't going to work for a woman.
I support Democrats and Republicans. And I'm telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he's gone, everybody's going to be sitting on their thumbs.
If Casey Stengel were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave.
Steve Jobs, if he had lived, was gonna design an iCar. I think cars have an extraordinary opportunity for cool design.
The Lord expects us to enjoy our lives. He says there will be some brutal times, but we shouldn't get all bent out of shape about it.
Rooney, of course, he believes that he is the reason that people stick around all the way through the show. They'll put up with anything, you know, in order to get to Rooney, and that's why we're at number 16 or 14 or whatever.
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
Real art is one of the most powerful forces in the rise of mankind, and he who renders it accessible to as many people as possible is a benefactor of humanity.
For me the most moving moment came when I first started working on 2001. I was already in awe of him, and he had very much already become Stanley Kubrick by the time the film started.
'Heel Turn 2' is about a person who's in a match, and he's playing as though the match were real. But it is real! If you're standing in the middle of a ring, and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real.
When my dad came here, he came on a scholarship in the late '60s, and he went to Mississippi State. My dad is not a large man. So there's a little Taiwanese guy walking around Mississippi in, like, 1966, and I cannot imagine what that must have been like.
As soon as I was old enough to drive, I got a job at a local newspaper. There was someone who influenced me. He wrote a column for The Guardian from this tiny village in India.
I was Chairman Mao's dog. What he said to bite, I bit.
When Barack Obama was asked about his lack of executive experience in 2008, he pointed to his successful campaign as proof he could manage the presidency.
A true Englishman doesn't joke when he is talking about so serious a thing as a wager.
The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.
It's not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts.
If the national coach lets decisions be made from outside, he's lost the team.
