I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.
We have been trying to play a lot of different kinds of music, and probably the next album will go back more towards the direction where you couldn't classify each song as a certain kind of music. This album you can.
Whenever you write music, you want it to touch people on a certain level. I mean, I've been reading tweets about 'Troublemaker' and people saying 'OMG, I can so relate to this - this is a guy that I fancy, or a girl that I fancy; it's exactly like th...
It's no longer necessary to slave over the vocals. I don't sing the lyrics until I write them, and singing is the very last thing I do. I record the entire track, and then I worry about lyrics and vocals. The music will suggest where the words are go...
I don't think my vocals demand effects. I like reverb to a certain extent, but I don't want to hide my voice. I like stripped-down vocals, but I also like crazy, powerful, doubled vocals like in dance or electronic music.
I don't really relate to certain blokey men who just want to talk about blokey things. I never really know what to say and I always feel I have to act blokey in order to have them not say, 'You're a weirdo.'
One of the greatest compliments you can ever get is when you make fun of a certain sect of people and they are laughing the hardest. When we did 'Men on Film' on 'In Living Color,' gay men wrote in how much they loved it.
In terms of whether my mom was influential, I think she instilled a certain way of thinking in me quite early: having a reflective mindset regarding my actions and trying to find the underlying reasons to behavior. I think that's quite helpful when y...
There's this index that tallies up how much your movies have made, and if they haven't grossed a certain amount, then you're not bankable. I know I'm not Will Smith but, you know, my ranking's pretty low. The only studio picture I've done is 'Zodiac,...
I've done movies for certain reasons; I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'
For most artists, you take what you have and who you are, and then you expand on it to make it more entertaining. Everyone knows actors aren't the same people that they play in movies, but people somehow expect musicians to be a certain way all the t...
There are certain things that they say you can't do, there are all these secret people behind the scenes who make things available for you to do. That's why you have so much crime and violence.
I suppose if you've never bitten your nails, there isn't any way to explain the habit. It's not enjoyable, really, but there is a certain satisfaction - pride in a job well done.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.
There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.
You can have an epidemic in a state. You can have it in a region. You can have it in a country where the critical level of disease passes a certain threshold, and we call that an 'epidemic threshold.'
There has always been a certain proportion of people who leave the Church on issues of authority and sex. That hasn't changed since we started doing research on it back in the early 1960s.
Any institution becomes a community - whether it's a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.
Hawthorne has given us a tradition that some people refer to as Yankee Magic Realism, and I do think there is a certain quality to the landscape that definitely leads into the dark woods.
Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.
On Twitter, when someone would die, I would write a joke. Or if there's a tragedy, I would write a joke and tweet it. That was my thing, and then at a certain point, people started demanding it.
