Humans are creatures of habit. If you quit when things get tough, it gets that much easier to quit the next time. On the other hand, if you force yourself to push through it, the grit begins to grow in you.
You need a platform upon which to release an orchestral record, otherwise it's just going to be an obscurity.
Television, in particular, doesn't look for talent; it looks for personas. You have a great persona? You can be a TV star.
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Those of you who can read I must beg you to read the Bible, and whenever you can get time, study the Bible, and if you can get no other time, spare some of your time from sleep, and learn what the mind and will of God is.
You have to lose yourself to find yourself.
I think that's what art is about: to provoke you. It helps me make sense of a senseless universe because I become the god of the story. I create it, and I see it in all its lineaments in my own way and can control it - in a world in which everything else is out of control.
I used to tell Jackie (Robinson) sometimes when they were throwing at him, 'Jackie, they aren't throwing at you because you are black. They are throwing at you because they don't like you.
Contrary to what you might assume, I didn't start with any advantages and neither did most of the successful people I know. I am the grandson of immigrants who came to this country seeking basic economic and personal liberty.
You know, my family stood for something that they believed in, and I wasn't about to turn my back on them.
I feel that in horror movies, especially, if you don't care about the characters, you've lost the audience. No one cares, and it becomes a process of watching people get killed.
I've learned to keep your mouth shut even when something bad is going on. You never know how someone is going to take something you say. You have to bite the bullet.
I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.
What makes architecture extraordinary is that you're looking at the building, but your peripheral vision is also seeing how it fits within a space. And it's seeing more than one part of the building at one time.
Some people can sometimes really invade your space and kind of never leave you alone.
We got ratings. It isn't that they won't quarrel with you, or say you're always right. But as long as you stay strong and the ratings are good and you're reasonable - I don't think we fought unreasonably. We basically won that right.
You must strive to multiply bread so that it suffices for the tables of mankind, and not rather favor an artificial control of birth, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.
A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are.
Well, in any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like.
What's quote-unquote a 'good' lawyer, doctor, or whatever the profession is. And if you're a male who grew up professionally in a male-dominated profession, then your image of what a good lawyer is a male image.
It scares you: all the noise, the rattling, the shaking. But the look on everybody's face when you're finished and packing, it's the best smile in the world; and there's nobody hurt, and the well's under control.
Maybe we slip so easily into blaming our parents - you're perpetually a child and they're perpetually a parent and you long to balance the equation, but it can only be balanced posthumously.
I have a deep, deep belief that if I tell you I'm going to crack you with a clean shot to the chin inside one minute of the first round and you will be unconscious, well, then that's what will happen.
Americans are big boys. You can talk them into almost anything. Just sit with them for half an hour over a bottle of whiskey and be a nice guy.
You know what? I did a lot of things that were deliberate, and they all backfired. I was trying desperately to become Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler, and it did not work for me. I took a lot of leaps that I shouldn't have, traditionally speaking. I paid the price for that. I was not as hire-able for a while. But then I just gave all that up.
It is not very practical in today's world when you tour all over the place having a big band.
If you don't have those moments where you go too far, then you're probably not going far enough.
'Whiplash' scared me. I feel you should only do projects that scare you to some degree. I get motivated by those sorts of feelings.
I'm accused of, and perhaps rightly so, of not being mean enough. I've been taken to task in many a book review; a good satirist has to, you know, has to kill.
You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.
Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on.
Many times when you make a movie, it feels like your biggest mistake. But even if a film isn't a hit, you shouldn't view it as a mistake.
You can't be a sexy person unless you have something sexy to offer. With me, it's my voice: the way that I sing, the way I express myself when I sing.
The more you participate in our common endeavors, the more successful your work in the factory, mine, wharf or village, in an economic institute or in the arts, in commerce or administration, the sooner we will be where we all want to be.
I think it's inconsistent to tell the American people that you oppose the war and, yet, you continue to vote to fund the war. Because every time you vote to fund the war, you're reauthorizing the war all over again.
Everyone's frightened. It's how you deal with that fear. It's very, very powerful. And what you've got to do is get it as a tailwind instead of a headwind. And that's a little bit of a judo trick in your mind. And once you learn that, fear starts to excite you. Because you know that you are going to enter into something and try it and risk.
