My definition of a friend is somebody who adores you even though they know the things you're most ashamed of.
What is music for? It's to make you feel good.
To walk behind others on a road you are traveling together, to give precedence to others without envy - this is painful for an individual and painful for a nation.
Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
Do not be misled by what you see around you, or be influenced by what you see. You live in a world which is a playground of illusion, full of false paths, false values and false ideals. But you are not part of that world.
There have been times when I played more than others, but I've been a road comic for a quarter of a century, so I've always played golf on the road because you have a lot of time to kill.
I've now discovered that if you know what you want and try hard to achieve it, everyone else will try hard, too.
You can still sit under the tree where Dr. Livingstone negotiated with slave traders to set people free.
People assume that because you have graced the same stage as the star act, in front of thousands, you must be reaping similar financial rewards. This is a complete fallacy.
I love so much what I do that I spend so much time thinking about it, and then I go home, and then I'm thinking about it, so it's nice sometimes when a movie is over, and then the niggling feelings about whether you've did it right or not start to ebb away.
But, you know, when I choose a film I need to believe in it and believe I can do something special with it, and after a while that means not trying to judge or analyze why I should do it. You have to follow this intuition thing, which is a mystery to me.
A lot of directors say, 'Do whatever you want, and I'll just change it on set.' But I love being involved in every part of production. It's very exciting. It's like an empire of creation: Everybody is working so hard to respect a vision and an idea, and it's very weird and inspiring at the same time.
To play this game, you've got to have heart, and a lot of guys don't have it. I can sit here and say we all do, but we all don't.
Our uniqueness makes us special, makes perception valuable - but it can also make us lonely. This loneliness is different from being 'alone': You can be lonely even surrounded by people. The feeling I'm talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are. I experienced this acutely at an early age.
There might've been wires, but I have this ability to make myself light. Well you know what, in ballet, when you kind of lift yourself here, it's all up in the head.
If you can find something you love, go for it everyday of your life, and it would be really good to you.
I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it's a certainty you'll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it's an awful process.
I heard about the book and I said, 'Oh my god, I've got to read this book,' and I didn't know that a white woman wrote it. Nobody said that to me, they just said, 'The Help - Oh my god, you've got to read it.' Everyone failed to mention it was a white woman, I think, because nobody really wants to talk about race.
The world knows already, they just don't have a picture up there or I'll spend the rest of my life in exile. It's hard to do that when you don't have any money.
I had to think long and hard about what it would imply, what it would mean. Would it mean any alterations of one's lifestyle? Or, more than that, the way that people regarded you? The way they reacted to you if you had a Sir in front of your name?
Motherhood has completely changed me. It's just about like the most completely humbling experience that I've ever had. I think that it puts you in your place because it really forces you to address the issues that you claim to believe in and if you can't stand up to those principles when you're raising a child, forget it.
You need to have the advice from experienced people coming from different kinds of educational and backgrounds in general, and then you can make a decision. But you need people around you that you trust to give you advice, and you need to make sure that the facts of the case are presented.
I think it's not an accident that you don't have that many Asian American women writers who are breaking out. I don't think it's an accident that you don't have that many Asian American writers, either women or men. I don't think that immigrants are encouraged to become artists. That's very gendered and racialized and ethnicized.
Nirvana was pop. You can have distorted guitars and people say it's alternative, but you can't break out of pop music's constructs and still get extensive radio play and media coverage.
Unless you're involved with thinking about what you're doing, you end up doing the same thing over and over, and that becomes tedious and, in the end, defeating.
To be outspoken is easy when you do not wait to speak the complete truth.
But when you're in something together, it's very hard to be objective and you're very subjective.
If you're trying to make a recipe that you're not even going to bother tasting, you're doing something wrong.
Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you're gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold.
You don't think anyone who lives an ordinary life has plenty of trouble and torment to write about?
A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.
I remember playing John Wayne Gacy, serial killer, very sick, neurotic, screwed-up guy. You know what? There's a part of me there, too, and you explore that.
Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.
When I'm not acting, I try to be normal, play golf, play hockey. It's funny because you're in this little bubble when you're working - you don't read books, you don't really keep up with the news, you're just living that life.
You know, with bands like Kiss back out on the road and Aerosmith coming out, we are going to be a band like that, in the sense that it's a big rock band.
The fact that you had disruptions in the peace process was not only in Rwanda. We had the same problem in Cambodia, we had the same problem in Mozambique, we had the same problem in Salvador.
