The acting training in school was great, but it was mostly fun being young and in New York. Because my upbringing was so transient, New York ended up being my home. I've been living in New York longer than I have anywhere else in my life.
I took the part in 'Mr. Holland's Opus' because no one had ever asked me to play 'a life' before. I get to age through 30 years. The idea really challenged me.
Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the good life. And I think, for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness.
I am a private guy, and at the end of the day, I only really do care about my family. That's the most important thing: my way of life, my family. Whoever is in front of that is going to get hurt.
Optimism is the ultimate definition of a leader. A leader has to look optimistically at what is ahead while not ignoring the challenges that must be overcome. Those challenges are in government, politics, world leadership, and even in community life.
I believe that architecture, as anything else in life, is evolutionary. Ideas evolve; they don't come from outer space and crash into the drawing board.
If you have a Falcon Heavy, and you have a Dragon, and you have a Bigelow module, then all of a sudden, life gets interesting.
Poems and songs penned as an unstoppable outpouring of the heart take on a life of their own. They transcend the limits of nationality and time as they pass from person to person, from one heart to another.
How do you survive living in a cell knowing you are innocent? Many of those exonerated whom I have met seem to have a more benign, grateful attitude toward life than those of us who walk free. Many find a religious or spiritual stronghold.
Personal discipline, when it becomes a way of life in our personal, family, and career lives, will enable us to do some incredible things.
I think for everyone it's good to have your own personal work on a character and a film before you even start rehearsing, to have an inner life.
I believe firmly in God's control in life.
By adopting a wonderful mutt, you'll save a life and help reduce animal homelessness while also boosting your chances of a more robust new furry friend, as mixed-breed dogs have demonstrated better health and longer life spans than their purebred cousins.
Qualities you need to get through medical school and residency: Discipline. Patience. Perseverance. A willingness to forgo sleep. A penchant for sadomasochism. Ability to weather crises of faith and self-confidence. Accept exhaustion as fact of life. Addiction to caffeine a definite plus. Unfailing optimism that the end is in sight.
Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.
The way I live now is that I only write, which means that I'm very poor but very happy. Everything in my life is the way I want it to be.
Life isn't perfect, of course, but we all know it's how you react to things that counts.
You can't go through life thinking about what could go wrong.
One of the biggest obstacles I've overcome in my life was thinking I didn't deserve to be successful. Artistically I'm not as much of a heavyweight as someone like Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell, because I'm not a creator of original music, and I worried about that for years.
The written word is the only anchor we have in life. How extraordinary would it be if we had even three or four paragraphs written honestly about their lives by our ancestors?
There's so much guilt there attached to having a perfectly good life.
One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.
We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.
I had a husband who stayed with me, and small children, and I had no choice but to pull myself together and rebuild a different kind of life. There was no other choice.
I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.
Life is a story. You and I are telling stories; they may suck, but we are telling stories. And we tell stories about the things that we want. So you go through your bank account, and those are things you have told stories about.
There is a guilty pleasure in being rude and knowing that it's acting rather than you. But you get the same release as if you were being rude in life.
Sometimes the transition from being in control of your life to having absolutely no control is swift, but other times it is so gradual that you wonder exactly when it truly began.
Christianity has aimed to deliver us from a life determined by nature, from the appetites as actuating us, and so has meant that man should not let himself be determined by his appetites.
My accent has changed my whole life. When I was younger, it was very Nigerian, then when we went to England, it was very British. I think I have a very strange, hybrid accent, and I've worked very hard to get a solid American accent, which is what I use most of the time.
I think, for a long time, people just did not know what to do with me. I looked like a Barbie doll, and then I had this voice like I spend my life in a bar, and I said things that were alarming and had ideas that didn't make sense.
I've been an athlete and competitor my whole life, and there's nothing more that I get off on than competition.
In football, like in life, you must learn to play within the rules of the game.
I've been painting all my life, and I'm serious about it. I use it as more or less an outlet.
'Nothin' on You' changed my life: I finally feel that I reached the point where I wanna be at. At times I questioned whether it was worth the sacrifice, but now I see it was.
It's a funny thing: my name in Arabic means hope, so I suppose I have to live by that principle. Hope is desire, feeling, and investing in a projection of something that doesn't yet exist. At its best, you witness its alchemy in your life, turning something that was once in the mind into reality. At its worst, it's delusion.
