Black excellence is a thing. People - from Beyonce Knowles to Venus and Serena Williams to folks you haven't heard of - are into it. It's less a movement than a standard: believers set the bar high not only for themselves but also for others who share their vision, especially when it pertains to black history, stories, and style.
I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.
You'll be fooled if you only get your hip-hop from the mainstream, you know. The things that move people are not just found in the mainstream cultures. And when we talk about hip-hop in general, hip-hop's basically preoccupied with life.
I have only recently got interested in film, and it is a strange way of working in many ways. But actually, when it is at its best, it's quite an extraordinary way of working between a director and an actor, to really explore an inner life.
Memorizing lines isn't really hard. Only with really hard words and stuff.
I think archaeologists are stuck, and we are losing our past at a very rapid rate. Tens of thousands of sites will be lost, and we've only unveiled a tiny percent of the past.
Not only don't I know who I am, but I'm very suspicious of people who do know who they are. I am sometimes ten or twelve people a day, and sometimes four or five people an hour!
The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.
People are not considerate of others. They tend not to consider themselves as all living together, but see themselves only as individuals.
Our village was built on the Ohio River, and was a halting place on this great national road, then the only avenue of traffic between the South and the North.
The Indonesian brands aren't interested in sports people, only movie stars, because they can get more exposure in the media.
I've got a lot of artistic energy, but there's only so much of it, though. You don't want to spread yourself thin.
I was an only child of a father who loved me deeply, but we didn't play catch, even though I was an athlete. We didn't go fishing or hunting or any of the things I wanted to do. Why not? He just didn't do that.
You are only as good as the people you work with, I think.
As a teenager and a student, I totally cast away the Christian faith. I just believed it was stupid, and only stupid people could believe it. I actually became an anti-Christian, and very antagonistic.
Ninety percent of my roles, I've had to fight for. It's only a really small percentage of people who get handed roles.
I think Barack Obama thinks that Muslims are the ones being persecuted, and he has to change that. The fact is he is contributing to Christians being persecuted, not only around the world, but in America as well.
'Painting like a child' isn't a negative for me... it's something only great artists can really achieve. The childlike quality of some of Picasso's drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete visions, feelings and portraits through a continuous line.
Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.
I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives.
A British director directed 'American Beauty,' an important film about American life, and it didn't matter. What only mattered was everyone's sensibility.
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
Nuclear is not only emissions-free, but renewing our commitment to nuclear power will create countless jobs at a time when our nation endures nearly double-digit unemployment.
Personal, inner change without a change in circumstances and structures is an idealist illusion, as though man were only a soul and not a body as well.
Doing a me-too business, because it's you - the only person who cares about that is you. The market doesn't care if it's you. The market is pretty much being served. You better have something that the world doesn't have, because even then, you might screw it up through your own ineptitude and inexperience.
I only know the lyrics to songs that I listened to between the ages of 11 and 15.
In the long march of history, at least two poles of attraction and antagonism have been the norm in world politics. Rarely has only one nation carried the burden of leadership. The unipolar world of the 21st century, dominated for the past two decades by the United States, is a historical anomaly.
Awards can't be what's important in your life. Because that only affects you in a sense. Life is so much more than that: It's your family and your friends and that sort of thing.
Calvin and Hobbes are the only two characters from my childhood reading that I return to with any regularity, and they have grown with me, yielding newer and deeper meaning.
The weakness in traditional Scottish nationalism lay in its own inability to grasp that identity could not be the only factor in the march to independence.
The Offshore Wind Energy Act could be not only a jobs creator, but also a history maker.
For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.
Everybody eats three times a day; it's only a question of where they choose to eat. The longer-term trends are people eat out more often.
If you're convinced as an artist of what you're doing, the only move is to, no matter what people say or what management says or your best friends say or people on Facebook, do what you do, and people will find their way to it.
I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.
The only thing that will make you happy is being happy with who you are, and not who people think you are.