I've been trying to write a book since before I was old enough to vote, and I've collected many rejection slips from publishers and magazines. I used to keep them all stuck to my refrigerator, with magnets, but an ex-girlfriend told me they were depressing, and defeatist, and suggested I take them down. A very wise suggestion on her part.
There's no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.
I played old men back in drama school. It's just now that I'm drawing level with the age of the characters I play, but I'm fine with that, and I've certainly never envied people who became hugely famous when they were young.
I want to remind you today that the greatest Artist of all time created you. He dreamed about you long before you were born, before a single brushstroke of your life took place.
I don't know to what extent someone can BECOME an artist - you either are or you aren't - and if you are you'll HAVE to make your way to some kind of sickly light, no matter how terrible the soil you were seeded in your nature will out somehow.
I just love the way the '60s rock stars put themselves together, because they were like dandies and peacocks. They really lived out their fantasies - and dressed their fantasies.
I used to shake my head when I heard about mothers who were shocked - shocked! - when their kids came out. I didn't understand how they had missed seeing something so essential when looking at their children. But too many parents see only what they want to see, and that's true whether our kids are gay or straight.
It was never physically dangerous except when I nearly fell off a horse, but it was physically arduous - especially when you were working late at night.
I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.
One of the things I sort of dreamt about awhile ago is that if Einstein were still alive, it would be absolutely wonderful to go to him and tell him about the discovery, and he would have been very pleased, I'm sure of that.
Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.
I'm a child of the sixties, I'm a man of the sixties. During that period of time this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution.
I always have a suitcase ready to go. My wife and I are both very much like this. We're both vagabonds, and we have been since the time we were married.
The commentary track became a lot like the movie and there are some funny, long, awkward pauses that you can tell we're just trying to find stuff to say. None of us had gotten to really talk about the movie until that moment and they were in New York and we were in L.A.
The Eagles and the critics were not the best of friends.
A problem was the lack of cooperation of the Afghan community itself. The women, though living in Iran, were under cover and not willing to participate in the film, and none of the ethnic groups were willing to work together or be together.
There are so many ways to characterize evolutionary success. If one criterion is the number of millions of years that the species persists, we're still just infants. We're way too young of a species to tell if we were a creative fluke or if we have any staying power.
Dad made it to Gold Shield Detective, so he always busted Robin, my oldest brother, and me. Always got caught, whatever we were doing.
Glenda Jackson called me an amateur in 1976 when we were in a play, 'The White Devil.' I've never forgiven her.
Those days if you drove cross country and you broke down on the side of the road, and the sign says 200 miles to the next gas station, you knew you were so screwed.
We were very happy when a South African court, which had previously ruled against us, took another look and decided that this material was not obscene and allowed it into the country.
As I wrote, I found that Aibileen had some things to say that really weren't in her character. She was older, soft-spoken, and she started showing some attitude.
I always told everybody the perfect joke would be where the setup and punch line were identical.
I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.
When you were born, you cried and everybody else was happy. The only question that matters is this - when you die, will you be happy when everybody else is crying?
I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings... At a certain point, I decided I didn't want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.
With this LP we were all very clear on the approach we wanted to take, which was to do something heavy, but also experiment with a lot of other things we really like.
My only friends were boys, and I was just one more of them.
I was mostly surprised by the rap artists, actually, that were influenced by Sabbath. That was a surprise. But it's very nice and I'm very honored. It's nice to know after 27 years now that what I said in the first place has stuck, and that was the belief in it.
But we were really locked in to that kind of format, and as the '90s wore on, it became for me more solidified, in that sense that there weren't as many of those magical shows that were just magic all the way through as there had been in earlier years.
It was the wont of the immortal gods sometimes to grant prosperity and long impunity to men whose crimes they were minded to punish in order that a complete reverse of fortune might make them suffer more bitterly.
The man at Kodak told me the shots were very good and if I kept it up, they would give me an exhibition. Later, Kodak gave me my first exhibition.
We were a very small circle of writers. Everybody brought to the table their own life experience.
She gave me another piece of information which excited other feelings in me, scarcely less dreadful. Infants were sometimes born in the convent; but they were always baptized and immediately strangled!
When I was performing the songs on 'Kiss Land,' it was a great singalong. But there were moments where I realized some parts were catchier than the others. There's maybe two choruses on all of 'Kiss Land.'
In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.
