Van Morrison is probably, at this point in time, my biggest influence as a vocalist. When we were making our last album I had a vinyl copy of 'Veedon Fleece' in the vocal booth in front of me, in the dorky sense. I think there were candles around, which is really tacky, but hey, I needed to channel Van the Man!
When you're young, you don't have much sense. You don't have any reasoning power. You don't have any ability to take a blow, an insult, a hurt in the right way. There is no way a child can do that. All a child can do is feel the pang of it, the heartache of it.
I need a woman to have a quirky sense of humor. There's a bunch of jokes I use, and if she doesn't get them, she's probably not for me.
On the recollection of so many and great favours and blessings, I now, with a high sense of gratitude, presume to offer up my sincere thanks to the Almighty, the Creator and Preserver.
Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
If you're an actor, there's going to be a sense of fantasy about yourself, especially in the celebrity world we live in today. You give the illusion of being in control, sexy, at ease, with never a difficult moment. Those are the basic lies that all celebrities tell. For me, they're the more dangerous lies to come to terms with.
I was down in Washington when 9/11 happened. We were in the middle of putting together the next summer season, and all I could think of was something somehow must make sense to us. Our Town kept coming into my mind.
Any man who has ever tried to use political power for the common good has felt an awful sense of powerlessness.
I wanted to take a stand against what I think was not so well established then but is thoroughly well established now, which is the substitution for a real sense of a country of a hideous distortion which you can sell to the people called 'heritage'.
I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.
I spent almost 25 years at Qualcomm before joining Microsoft, so in a sense, I grew up at one company. During that time, I made a very big shift from the engineering side to the business side.
Growing up in a rural setting in Minnesota, I was raised with the outdoors and a sense of adventure.
I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.
I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.
I'll play a happy character, but most characters are driven by a pain or a fear. They are driven by something deep down, and most people are like that in the sense. And so, that's what interests me.
The majority of the members of the Irish parliament are professional politicians, in the sense that otherwise they would not be given jobs minding mice at crossroads.
I think our sense as actors of what we've just done - whether or not it be in an audition - is usually really not connected to any truth. I'm always asking for more takes and more goes. I think I just need to shut up and listen.
Growing up, I think I always had a sense of art: a sense that there was poetry in the world. I didn't know where I was going to find it. I didn't know where I was going to fit in, that was for sure. But I kept moving forward. There wasn't a future in anything other than movement.
I was one of those people who just flitted about in life. I had no plans and no sense of direction.
My dream is to have a baby, not to adopt one, because I am not up to it and I don't feel strong enough. I want my own child, a biological child, the fruit of my sperm, conceived through artificial insemination because it wouldn't make sense for me to make love to a woman I don't love.
I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what's evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We're less sure about what is good. There's sort of good, good enough, could be better - but absolute good is a little harder to define.
It helps being from somewhere other than Hollywood, not having grown up with that sense of film-making. I really wasn't exposed to that as a young woman.
Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
What allows us, as human beings, to psychologically survive life on earth, with all of its pain, drama, and challenges, is a sense of purpose and meaning.
Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come, nor care beyond today.
This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.
Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.
Whether it is an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system, an attempt to bring down an airplane over Detroit, an attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square... I think that gives us a sense of the breadth of the challenges that we face, and the kinds of things that our enemy is trying to do.
Obviously there is no such thing as race, and in many ways, sex is a continuum, not a binary. So it doesn't make sense to label people in that way.
The quest for riches darkens the sense of right and wrong.
If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.
Once you have an animal, you have to commit to it. They need a sense of freedom, but, of course, they must have some boundaries. I am against hitting them though; just send the vibe and that will do it.
He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.
In Rikers, you had the Italians over here, the Spanish over here, the Blacks here, then there would be your Christians here and your Muslim brotherhood here. It's just like the outside, but in very closed quarters where you have to get along or else. The sense of claustrophobia in 'Orange is the New Black' - that's real.
I think the sexiest thing about a woman is confidence, but confidence in a humble way, not in an arrogant way. Sense of humor is definitely important. And sunglasses always hide a multitude of sins. Sunglasses and a great pair of heels can turn most outfits around.
No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.
