I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize - out of like 5,000 ...
This game wears on you. It tears you down. It's perpetual motion for some people who've achieved a level of independence, like Madonna and Jay-Z - they don't need to do music anymore. But there's people who need it. And in that need, that's when it's...
Music makes us want to live. You don't know how many times people have told me that they'd been down and depressed and just wanted to die. But then a special song caught their ear and that helped give them renewed strength. That's the power music has...
There's a relationship between music and spirituality and inspiration and to a certain extent improvisation that draws me in, because I don't totally understand it. I know that those relationships have been telling me, since I started making records,...
The most dangerous part of the race is early evening and especially early morning. It's the twilight zone. Either you're going into darkness and the sun is dropping down, or you're coming out of the darkness and the sun is coming up. At the same time...
You know, the market was down yesterday... my first thought when I heard-just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, Time to buy.
Even if it wasn't always morning in America during the years of his presidency, Reagan's eagerness to insist that it was tapped into a longing among voters. They didn't want to picture themselves turning down their thermostats and buttoning up their ...
Declining to go to church with my parents in the morning, I would ostentatiously set out for the Monist Society in the afternoon, down an obscure street which it seemed a little improper to be walking on, as everything was closed for Sunday, upstairs...
I once waited on Sean Connery. A long time ago. This was at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh. They closed down the restaurant for him, and when he walked in with his morning paper, all the waitresses started squealing. He was a big guy, bigger than ...
Generally, when I wake up in the morning I set out a series of problems for myself and I write them down, and when I'm sleeping, my mind solves the problems. When I wake up in the morning, I have more clarity on the issue.
People say, 'Gee, you don't really do political music.' Well, I sing a lot of songs about how men and women and lovers treat each other, and none of us want to be talked down to or belittled or ignored or disrespected... So I'm proud to be a feminist...
I know many married men, I even know a few happily married men, but I don't know one who wouldn't fall down the first open coal hole running after the first pretty girl who gave him a wink.
Even after they had stopped modeling for Playboy and had settled down with other men to raise families of their own, Hugh Hefner still considered them his women, and in the bound volumes of his magazine he would always possess them.
Almost the first thing you see after entering the Houdini exhibition at the Jewish Museum is a large-screen film of Harry Houdini hanging by his ankles upside-down from a tall building, high over a sea of men in fedoras, and thrashing his way out of ...
When I was a kid, I wanted a Chanel bob and bangs. My mom said no. I went to the salon anyway, and they said, 'No way - we are not going to do that to your hair.' So I did it myself. Big mistake. Instead of my bangs going down straight, they were sti...
I have a lot of influences. I like to sit down with the cinematographer a month before, and we'll watch pieces of 20 or 30 movies. You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in...
I grew up watching old black and white movies where Marlene Dietrich or Jean Harlow would go walking down some cobblestone street in ripped stockings and head into some smoky boite and sing for a pathetic living. That's so what I wanted to be.
I'm not saying anything that's unknown, but movies are always cut down and there's a lot of complexity within the film that is not always widely accepted by the general audience, which is just a reality; a movie of a certain size, they don't want peo...
The movies were so healing for me because I had such an isolated, lonely childhood. Going to the movies and having the lights go down, you disappear. If you have esteem issues, suddenly you're in a void where nobody can see you. You are just by yours...
The thing about living in Los Angeles and doing a lot of movies is that you get to go to a lot of premieres, and, regardless of whether or not you're a celebrity, you still get to walk down the red carpet and then have everyone sort of screaming your...
[as arrows rain down on the Spartans, Astinos begins laughing hysterically] Stelios: What the hell are you laughing at? Astinos: Well, you had to say it! Stelios: What? Astinos: "Fight in the shade"! [both laugh]
