When you have Julio Iglesias on a song, I think that's golden.
I have learned, if you give a team a budget, then the team tries to maximise the budget so that they get the same next year.
Do you not yet understand what has made woman what she is? Then see what the sickly taste and perverted judgment of man now admires in woman.
When you're looking through bins of thousands of random, unsorted photos, every hundredth one or so will have some writing on it.
There's a problem with political polling in that you have so much pressure to do what your client wants you to do and say what your client wants you to say. I've never felt that pressure. I am independent of the political parties.
We were very poor, and I entered a talent contest as a young teenager because if you entered, even if you didn't win, they gave you a free blouse.
As an artist, you make music. And if you see people who don't know how to market your music, you get involved in it. Otherwise, what you want to accomplish 'gets lost in translation' - no pun intended.
I think most actors go into the business thinking, 'I can play everything. Why can't I play a black woman? Just give me a chance.' Then you grow up and realize it's probably better that they cast an actual black woman.
You got to have a lot of courage. Secondly, whatever it is you're doing, you have to believe in it wholeheartedly. Thirdly, you have to be able to stand up in front of people and know that they'll laugh.
I really don't have anything urgent to say, and I think you shouldn't write unless you have something urgent to say. Sometimes that troubles me, and sometimes I don't really care.
My attitude is that, if you have nothing to hide, why not show it?
You can get totally messed up trying to please everyone with what you do, but ultimately, you have to please yourself.
Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. That's it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can.
Just by the nature of making the choice to be true to who I am, I'm political. Sometimes that's all you need to do: Show up and be black, gay and Christian in America and actually say it out loud. And refuse to let anything or anybody take that away from you.
I've just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I'll tell you what, never again.
Having Black hair is unique in that Black women change up styles a lot. You can walk down one street block in New York City and see 10 different hairstyles that Black women are wearing: straight curls, short cuts, braids - we really run the gamut.
Trying to make a feature film yourself with no money is the best film school you can do.
I'm not in denial about technology, but my mother used to say when I was a kid, 'Son, you're handless,' because I couldn't fix anything. My ambition is to be a Luddite.
If you paid Americans a living wage, they would be able to pay for products made by Americans in America.
You go into any recording studio in the world, and you see candles, lights, and that Apple light from a Mac.
If one day someone came up to me and was like, 'Look, you're never going to act again,' I don't know what I would do.
One of the pillars of backward thinking in America is the idea that you can have jobs or you can have clean air and water, but you can't have both. That myth has been busted a thousand times, but still it lives on.
Obviously, writing together is very intimate because it's sort of acting where you need to get to a really deep place to get the most emotional song.
I've always written songs the same way. You learn different tricks - you learn craft, you learn structure, all that - as you go.
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
When you believe in something, fight for it. And when you see injustice, fight harder than you've ever fought before.
People have all kinds of approaches when they come up to me. Some of them are so nervous: 'You know, Mr. Cosby, you are my biggest fan!' I am? Some of them even claim that I raised them.
The media is convincing people that if you have that 'next thing,' that diamond, the right car, then you'd be happier.
When I ask the young people from California why they want to go to New York, and the ones from the East why they're determined to go West, I hear what you'd expect: new challenges, different weather, boyfriends, girlfriends, to make a name... They laugh when I say, 'But your poor mother.'
One has to create music with mass appeal and not something which is niche. With niche music, you will only go a small distance.
My weekends are spent hidden in the woods, and then I have to come back and pretend to be this very upper-crust insurance investigator. But, I mean, duality's nice. You never get bored. You can't say the grass is always greener if you're in both backyards.
What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.
For me, music is in the choice of what not to play as much as in what you've chosen to play.
If you're going to build a lean enterprise, you can test and measure how often the company ships iterations, how often it fails, how often it is putting things in front of people that don't work.
I've got a good mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it!
You can build many relationships with people while playing 18 holes, no matter how good you are.
