When you get up into the crown of a redwood tree, you lose sight of the ground entirely. You also lose sight of the sky. And you're in a lost world. You're in an undiscovered, unexplored ecosystem, somewhere between Heaven and Earth, filled with forms of life, not all of which have been given names by scientists yet.
If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
Being a professional wrestler surely prepares you for any acting role in that we have to act on live television, so there's a lot of pressure put there.
The experience of being an Olympian is one that can never be taken away from you.
Female rappers get it the hardest. You have to be a girl, yet you have to be just as hard as the guys. I think some female rappers get scared out of the business before they can make it.
I feel very comfortable with my trajectory because I do have a life; I can go on the subway, you know? And I've been able to do that my entire career, and I have friends who are huge movie stars and can't go on the subway, and I feel like that sucks.
Golf is a matter of confidence. If you think you cannot do it, there is no chance you will.
A joke is not a thing but a process, a trick you play on the listener's mind. You start him off toward a plausible goal, and then by a sudden twist you land him nowhere at all or just where he didn't expect to go.
You need a balance at all times. If the verse is a bit messy, you need it to be less messy right after. It needs to vary. 'Shake It Off' is a good example, where the math behind the drama is pretty clear.
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.
We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.
Some people think that if their opponent plays a beautiful game, it's okay to lose. I don't. You have to be merciless.
Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.
But I got drafted out of high school, and my mother wasn't having it. She was like, you're not about to think that you can just play ball, because if you get hurt, you're going to be out of luck.
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.
When things are perfect, that's when you need to worry most.
They don't draft you to sit there and stand on the sideline.
I love being supportive of other YouTubers because I know how much work and dedication goes into building a channel, and I think that the community on YouTube is just so important because the viewers get to be a part of what you're creating.
I can do comedy, so people want me to do that, but the other side of comedy is depression. Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don't realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.
When I was a kid going into the movies, you weren't force-fed information everywhere you looked about what the movie was going to be.
If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in person.
When you're playing a character in a book, there's already a lot of pressure because all of the millions of people who have read the series have been able to envision and become very attached to the characters.
Well, there's a morality in that you want your work to be good, I suppose.
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
It doesn't feel that good when you're ahead the whole way.
I think that if you idealise someone for so long, they can only disappoint and I wouldn't want to be disappointed by those people.
We're all constantly keeping score. You can't help it. But trying to pit ourselves against other people in some measurable way is largely a waste of time.
Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road towards emancipation, you have committed yourself to fight against all forces that seek to use your blackness as a stamp that marks you out as a subservient being.
Your ideas and the things that you do are dumb and stupid and make no sense - until you start getting recognized and making money. Then you're a genius.
You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.
The knowledge of yourself will preserve you from vanity.
Whatever sport you choose, do it because you love it, and don't expect to be an expert first thing. It takes time to do well at anything, but if you love it, you'll stick with it.
The most amazing thing is when you find yourself watching someone in the cafe or something doing something weird. It's amazing what people do, isn't it, when you just look at them, when you take the time to look.
At a festival, a lot of people came to see other artists, so you have to put on a signature set and performance: 'This is what I do, this is why I'm here.' At solo gigs, I'm a DJ - I'll play two-and-a-half hours, and not just my own music, also my favorite songs by other artists.
What do you want? What do you want your life to be? What do you want your testimony to be? Go for it!
There are some great skinny girls, but it's about characters, isn't it? That's what I find attractive. People who've had interesting lives and tell you something that you don't know or are really good fun.
