The whole 'American Idol' way of looking at things is the antithesis of what I grew up with. There are a whole lot of kids wanting to be famous now, whereas if I'd even mentioned that word to one of my teachers, I would have got into a whole load of ...
There's the famous thing that the A&R man from the record company is supposed to do: He's supposed to come into the studio and listen to the songs you've been recording and then say, 'Guys, I don't hear any singles.' And then everybody falls into a t...
Having a Nobel Prize or being a famous scientist will get you a week to a week and a half, metaphorically speaking, of a hearing for your new idea, but after that, it's going to tank if you don't have the evidence and support for it.
One of the pleasant duties of America's most famous announcers during the relatively short swing era of the big bands was to host late-night remotes from some of the most famous ballrooms throughout the country.
I was a shy kid, but somehow I knew I would make it as a performer. I'd always be telling my mum that I was going to be a famous singer. In my school yearbooks I would write, 'Remember me when I'm famous.' I knew I had a gift.
A few of the world's most famous non-American novelists have large followings in the United States, among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Guenter Grass, who were both popular even before winning the Nobel.
I didn't get hugely famous really quick. It was a slow, gradual process, so I was able to sort of grow into myself and figure out who I was and what I wanted without the glaring spotlight on me telling me who I was.
For me, I was able to make that statement of faith early on when my career began, so there weren't really a lot of surprises. People around me knew where my husband Ray and I stood as far as my faith went.
Faith that it's not always in your hands or things don't always go the way you planned, but you have to have faith that there is a plan for you, and you must follow your heart and believe in yourself no matter what.
It just took all of that to come to a screeching halt, to get to the point of having nothing, for me to finally realize, Hey, what are you fighting with this for? Until then, I hadn't claimed my faith as my own; I had just grown up with it.
When I was born in 1942, World War II was still going. And I began to realize when I became a young adult that if we don't teach our kids a better way of relating to their fellow human beings, the very future of humanity on the planet is in jeopardy.
If you put yourself in a place where you're having to work at understanding something, then you keep yourself awake to all possible choices. How the body will look like in the future, the ethics of the body: those are questions that really fascinate ...
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
You should be a person inside the world with knowledge of your terrain. And if you lock yourself into the 2,000-by-3,000-square-mile, lower-48 box of the United States, you're going to be frustrated by its limitations. You gotta think outside the box...
Real-life people are often the hardest to play, people that you recreate who have actually lived, because you have to live up to people's knowledge of those characters.
It's kind of interesting, because hacking is a skill that could be used for criminal purposes or legitimate purposes, and so even though in the past I was hacking for the curiosity, and the thrill, to get a bite of the forbidden fruit of knowledge, I...
The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.
The simple life on the farm was everything to me. Nothing was more relaxing after a long plane flight than to reach the winding driveway that led up to my house. The quiet of the night was more soothing than a sleeping pill.
Since babyhood, I've always evolved from one thing to another. My mother gave me ballet lessons at 6 as part of her enthusiasm for the arts and for life. We went to museums, to the theater. While her own talent was untapped, she worked for church cau...
Concert dance is the hardest kind of dance. We tour constantly, around the world, year in and year out. It just doesn't work for everybody. It's the lifestyle, it's the stamina, it's the love, it's the dedication, it's the commitment, it's all those ...
I have a Tony Award now. It hasn't changed too much in the theater world, but it gives me entree for film stuff and TV stuff, where people will see me more easily now because they know me.
