It is of no use to commit whole pages to memory, merely to recite them once without hesitation; you must think of the meaning more than the words - of the ideas more than the language.
And I know that the younger generation is doing things that are so ingenious. And for them it's not a matter of a political belief or an environmental stance. It's really just common sense.
Normally, in a film with lots of twists and turns, half of them don't make sense; they're just there for their own sakes.
I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.
What is it about summer that makes children grow? We feed and water them more. They do get more sun, but that probably doesn't matter as much as the book they read or the rule they broke that taught them something they couldn't have learned any other way.
Riches are not forbidden, but the pride of them is.
Everything you do to other people affects them, and how you treat people affects them.
Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.
I think people really appreciate clever commercials, as do I. I think they're very entertaining. You just have to wade through all the garbage. That's one of the reasons people watch the Super Bowl. A lot of them watch it to see the commercials and not the actual game.
Empowering women by allowing them to choose when and how many children to have is not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do.
I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.
After the threat of war is gone, we should not turn our backs on the men and women who eliminated that threat. We should embrace them and keep our promises we made to them.
We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them.
Now that I am much older, I have had a number of sax players tell me I was responsible for them playing sax. Some of them I have admired over the years.
It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
I am very proud of The Saints and I'm very glad that I've been associated with them all these years, but the next record is the best record... has to be the philosophy for any band that remains even halfway decent or vibrant, and that is kind of where my head's at.
If we go and see hundreds of different market resources, you are seeing hundreds of different points of view, and once in a while, my experience is, you will come across one or two that are just outstanding, and you never would have thought of them.
I see guys with, like, eyebrow art, and I wanna tell them, 'You don't have to go too crazy on your brows. Take it easy, man!'
I lost races because I wanted too much to win them in beating my rivals.
I think 'Two Towers' is a completely distinct film from 'Fellowship of the Ring' or 'Return of the King.' I think that you can watch them as a group and watch how the story evolves, but I think each one was made in its own entirety, and each one has its own palate of sound and music and color and characterization.
What Hollywood truly wants is for people to be themselves. I think what it's designed for is to kind of turn people into something and just make them saleable. But what it really stands for, what it really loves, are people who are unafraid to be themselves, and as you can see, these are people who are excelling in their careers.
Warren Beatty once told me that if someone's really stuck on you, find them their next boyfriend. But I could never do that.
A fan would get an autograph and that was that. If we didn't tour again for five years, we wouldn't remember them.
That is what I always tell service clubs: If you hear of somebody who is very young and talented, pick them up and give them that little assistance to make sure that they get to the professional stage.
My real dream is that everybody will see their self-interest tied up with someone else, whether or not they see them, and see that as an opportunity for growing closer together as a culture and as a world.
There are so many songs that I could not sing the way I wanted to. When such songs come on television or radio, I shut them off or leave the room.
We're thinking about printing the lyrics with the next record so that people can find their own meaning in them. But then they would start having a life of their own, and I think the Portishead music should stay a whole in which the lyrics come second, actually.
If nice guys finish last, then great guys come in right after them.
I know what men want. Men want to be really, really close to someone who will leave them alone.
A lot of people have a sense-of-entitlement mentality that somebody else ought to do these things for them. People are mad at the government for not getting jobs for them. I don't understand why it's the government's responsibility.
My father was a civil servant in northern India where I was born. As a boy I saw the dire effects of poverty and illiteracy, especially on women and children. It often seemed that the only thing separating me from them was luck.
Women like to watch women fight because it makes them feel sort of empowered physically and mentally. They feel kind of jazzed and excited by it.
My sense was that most of the elected officials in Washington - in their heart of hearts - really believe that the system can't be too bad because it produced them.
A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.
My parents spent 16 years hauling my butt to L.A. for audition after audition. I remember always hoping I could help take care of them because they took such good care of me.
I hope the fathers and mothers of little girls will look at them and say 'yes, women can.'
