Dance with a girl three times, and if you like the light of her eye and the tone of voice with which she, breathless, answers your little questions about horseflesh and music about affairs masculine and feminine, then take the leap in the dark.
I've seen what you can do in this grassroots, do-it-yourself world, and I've seen how far that can get you. To be iconic, you still need the gatekeepers to open the doors.
Your closet needs to be a place of joy and celebration of who are you now - not who you were.
One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.
I don't think I'm a singer, I think I'm an expressionist. But it takes time to put it in people's minds that this guy is not singing, 'Baby, I want to have you.' This guy is actually thinking about what he's saying. This guy has something to say.
I would have gone right ahead but the only thing, the only phenomenon that's going on now of course, which is different in my experiences, is that you are getting things planted in the Net by people about the Woman in White on the Net. That's not a nice change.
If you smash a city when you're trying to capture it, you actually end up providing the perfect terrain for the defenders while blocking the access for your own armoured vehicles.
I used to hang out by the food table at parties because you don't have to talk to anybody. If you do then you can talk about the food.
And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.
You see, you can't put joblessness in a jail cell.
Nothing ruins the lines of a suit or blazer and makes you look more like a doofus than when your pockets are crammed with stuff - a wallet, a cell phone, keys, a calculator, a calendar, pens, etc.
You respect all of these people that you know in the business as actors. And they sort of turn around and say, we really like your work. It's a nice acknowledgment.
I think my body is beautiful, and I'm confident to embrace it. There's nothing to be ashamed of if you're a size 14, as long as you're fit and healthy.
If you want to know what London looked like in 1947, with all the bomb-sites, 'Hue and Cry' will tell you. And when I shot 'The Lavender Hill Mob' four years later, it didn't look that different.
My entertainment was going to the local dollar movie theatre on the weekend, where I watched old black and white movies. If you wanted current movies, you had to drive to the big city.
If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore.
Any time you've got both the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, you're not long for the White House.
You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
If you are a musician who has released albums, it would perhaps be morbidly interesting to know how much you would be owed if everyone who now has your music had actually bought your record.
I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the rankings because calculations can distract you.
Abortion is a hard thing for Hollywood to deal with because it is so controversial and you don't want to alienate half your audience by sending one message or the other.
Retire? Not on your life. I have no plans to stop singing. What are you going to do when you love music? It's a terrible disease. You can't stop. Of course, I'd like to get off the road.
I think when you talk about competing against others, the problem is that you refer to something that's been done already and try to beat it.
When you review the Central American wars or other Latin American wars, you find that there were dictators and there were insurgents.
I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class-room.
Follow your passion. Be yourself, but check yourself before you wreck yourself.
You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.
I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time - and this includes naps - I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.
You may have read that I went to M.I.T. In 1982 I filled out a Who's Who survey with joking responses, and they never bothered to check the facts.
You just have to stand and grit your teeth and know your poll numbers are going to go down - and mine have - but you gotta grit through it because the alternative is unacceptable.
You never toot your own horn.
Millions of Americans cannot tell you who lived at Mount Vernon or who wrote the Declaration of Independence - let alone the Emancipation Proclamation. But they know that to be 'a Benedict Arnold' is to be a traitor of the deepest dye - someone who coldly betrays not only a sacred cause but every moral scruple along the way.
Most film productions, when they're based at a place, they get, like, a 30-mile radius or a 30-minute radius to get out of the town. And once you go past that, your day starts to become shorter, and you have to start paying your drivers more, and everybody just gets paid more, and you have less time to shoot, and everything costs more.
If you can't take it, you won't make it.
Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
