It's never been difficult for me to say no. I have never given excuses like I don't have dates. I have never over-quoted to avoid a project. I simply say that while the script might be good, I can't connect with it. My strategy is that while I wouldn't want anyone to waste my time, I shouldn't be doing that, either, with others.
History serves as a model not only of who and what we are to be, we learn what to champion and what to avoid.
As a rule, I am lazy and prefer to avoid anything resembling work, and research feels like work, as opposed to my strong suit, which is sitting around making things up.
We need to avoid the spiritual sickness of a church that is wrapped up in its own world: when a church becomes like this, it grows sick.
Actors should avoid talking about their personal lives.
Avoid problems, and you'll never be the one who overcame them.
If you live on Nantucket, you can't avoid its history, and 'Moby Dick' is the way most of us get into Nantucket's history.
Which reminds me of a fortune cookie: you often find your destiny on the path you take to avoid it.
I have a calendar life that is complicated, so I use BusyCal and Google Calendar. I keep two different browsers open to avoid some confusion.
I haven't written an awful lot recently, but I think I probably will start again very shortly. Being so much on the road, when you have a couple of weeks off, you're likely to avoid sitting at the piano, and taping, and giving yourself more work to do.
The first thing you need to know, in order to establish some perspective and avoid panic, is that the violent government excesses we're seeing today are far from unprecedented.
The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.
Man should not try to avoid stress any more than he would shun food, love or exercise.
The day I showed up to South Carolina to work, I was with my kid and my ex and our dog and Kirk was hanging with this weird guy and I kind of defined the two of them by his friend and made a vow to avoid him.
Even if the Brits decide to remain, we will have to avoid a contagion on other countries.
I really tried to avoid living in L.A. for as long as I can.
We would have been happy if we could have assigned just three categories, large, medium, and small; the point is, we wanted to avoid personal judgments. It actually turned out to be quite a finely tuned scale.
If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.
Low income persons in need of social housing should be housed in more prosperous areas to avoid placing an extra burden on the poorer areas and to redress the balance in terms of housing, redressing the balance in terms of schooling.
You can't force something like that. But we have encouraged our audience, because we avoid the confrontation of regular rock concerts: us up here, you down there. Instead, we're looking for interaction.
It goes without saying that the desire to accomplish the task with more confidence, to avoid wasting time and labour, and to spare our experimental animals as much as possible, made us strictly observe all the precautions taken by surgeons in respect to their patients.
I do think that people have a desire to talk about issues they may have wanted to avoid before.
It is our grave mistake that for many years we neglected pro-Western groups in order to avoid any friction with the existing rulers.
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.
The alternative minimum tax was designed to prevent the very wealthiest Americans from overusing certain tax benefits to avoid most of their tax burden.
The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings.
Safer chemicals and more energy-efficient technologies can provide cooling without severe climate implications. Shifting to these alternatives could avoid the equivalent of 12 times the current annual carbon pollution of the United States by 2050.
Now he must not go the wrong way round the circuit, and unless he can spin himself stationary through 360 degrees I fail to see how he can avoid doing so.
I'm supportive of practical nationalism, like the kind we need in Canada to avoid being absorbed into a much larger country. The kind of nationalism I despise as destructive and infantile is really just tribalism writ large.
If I can avoid looking at myself, I will. I don't care to examine myself or see much of what I do. I never care how I look.
I'm shy, paranoid, whatever word you want to use. I hate fame. I've done everything I can to avoid it.
Community colleges are great bargains. They avoid the fancy amenities four-year liberal arts colleges need in order to lure the children of the middle class.
To follow imperfect, uncertain, or corrupted traditions, in order to avoid erring in our own judgment, is but to exchange one danger for another.
No one can avoid death; it is inevitable. Therefore, I should create in my mind a kind of willingness and accepting for that event without any fear.
I try to avoid cheese, dairy and a lot of meat, but I do like them.
Any set of decisions about design is inevitably influenced by cultural prejudice, no matter how intent an architect might be to avoid it.
