President Obama believes in a level playing field.
I never played the 'decoration,' I always played the one who suffered. And then I got very lucky in my middle career, when I started playing the hero, which at that point was quite rare for women.
Let me explain something about guitar playing. Everyone's got their own character, and that's the thing that's amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up. Everyone's approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it's all valid.
You can learn a lot when you play in a little town in Holland or Western Australia, and you learn different things than you would learn playing a big city.
Every album, I'm worried that I'm a dork and a fraud - 'What if I can't sing anymore?' Then I stop thinking and start playing guitar, and I realize that it's okay to suck, and move forward.
Back in East St. Louis, tennis wasn't the real thing. If you weren't playing baseball, basketball, football, you were kind of on the outside.
Icy and earthy, Helen Mirren is a rare, regal presence in a movie age that values the plebeian over the patrician and mass over class. Lauded with an Oscar and an Emmy for playing both Queen Elizabeths, Mirren has matched her cool aristocracy with a boldness of performance and display.
I went to Dartmouth College, graduated, and had the opportunity to play two professional sports - I played for the New England Patriots in the NFL and professional lacrosse for the Boston Blazers. I had an injury, so I had to stop so I could heal. But when I was playing football, I wasn't making a lot of money; I wasn't a superstar.
If there's a song that stops meaning anything to me, then I'll quit playing it.
I would have loved to record with Paul McCartney on some of his early solo recordings, wonderful music. Playing some lovely organ, perhaps. I would have loved to record with John Lennon. He was a dear friend. I had lunch with him just two days before he died.
I think that there are a lot of really beautiful Christmas carols, and then sometimes there are horrible renditions of them that are played to death in malls that make me sad. I try to avoid stores where they're playing bad versions of Christmas songs on repeat.
How often do you see young actors playing scholars? Or striving to be intellectuals, you know? It's not that often.
The best thrill is standing on stage and playing - other than being married to my wife.
I'm always looking for that sense of fun and adventure and even unlikeability. I don't want to be the obvious leading lady. I have the most fun playing these girls who are a little damaged and maybe a little insecure and trying to overcompensate for it.
There's something really freeing about playing a character that isn't even, like, remotely likeable whatsoever.
Whenever you get traded out and you are playing for a winning team, it's always good.
I love playing anyone that does stuff that I don't do.
My job as the actress playing Hanna Schmitz, as the actress playing any part, is to understand the character, and to ultimately love the character. And I did love Hanna, absolutely, because I understood her as profoundly as I did at the end of the day.
'For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge' took a year to record; that's why the playing on it might sound somewhat labored. 'Balance,' on the other hand, was written and recorded in only four months, so the whole process was quicker and more immediate.
When you're playing music through the streets of London at 2 o'clock in the morning, there's something so cool and magical about that. It takes you to a special place very quickly.
I feel really fortunate that, in playing guitar and surfing, I've found two things that mean so much to me, and which really complement each other. There's definitely a spiritual thing to both of them; they totally connect you to a higher realm.
When I'm on an adult set and I'm in a scene, I am myself. I'm not acting. I am playing to the camera, definitely, but I am myself.
I've been a Colt for almost all of my adult life, but I guess in life, and in sports, we all know nothing lasts forever. Times change, circumstances change, and that's the reality of playing in the NFL.
Probably more than anybody else, I loved Nat 'King' Cole as a performer - not only his singing but his piano playing. Whenever he had a new record come out, I'd get it and try to learn how he was playing. And he was one of the nicest people I'd ever met.
There was a time when I was - after my very first record from Nashville, I thought I might not be one of those who actually really makes it, and I may end up back in Canada, just playing clubs. And that might - this might have just been it.
I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.
The great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them. But there are conductors that actually inhibit the players from playing with each other properly.
I was raised looking at women who were strong, and they weren't really into playing race cards or playing gender cards. I didn't grow up around women who were like, 'Well, let the boys do that, and let the girls do that.' I didn't really see that in my house.
I'm a very private person, and you have a lot of people looking into your personal life, away from football. That's the one thing that I don't like, but I always remember how lucky we are that we're playing football.
I admire Brad Pitt. He hasn't just done leading-man hunky roles; he's done a lot of edgier things. I like playing people with a dark side.
I started playing golf at about four years old.
I've been a DJ since I was about 13, and I started out as a hip-hop DJ. So I was always playing records that would just get people going. I was just doing parties and high school dances and whatever, and then, progressively, I started making my own music, writing little songs here and there, but it was never anything crazy.
I felt very patriotic playing a New York City cop.
For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in 'Paris' were written with Debussy's 'String Quartet,' his 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune,' or Canteloube's 'Songs of the Auvergne' playing in the background.
Everybody thought that screen time was bad for vision. Well, it happens that spending a lot of time reading on a computer is bad for your vision, but spending a lot of time playing first-person-shooter games is good for your vision.
For someone like me, music is all I've ever thought about - playing big shows, and then, when you take something that is based around your music and put it in a completely different medium, it's a really interesting and cool emotion to watch.
