I'm not attracted to naturalism, I'm not attracted to behavior, I'm attracted to dance. I'm attracted to gesture, I'm attracted to singing with your voice, as opposed to having a natural manner. I'm a theater actor first, so that probably influences ...
Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at many restaurants and could only drink from water fountains marked 'Colored.' When I went to the movies, I would have t...
Patty: How do you go to the bathroom in space? Jim Lovell: Well, um... I tell you it's a very complicated procedure that involves cranking down the window and looking for a gas station.
Bart: I better go check out this Mongo character. [Bart reaches for his gun] Jim: Oh no, don't do that, don't do that. If you shoot him, you'll just make him mad.
I admit there's an element of brutality in all my work - it's part of the truth about human existence I always want to explore - but the last thing I'm trying to do is put on some kind of freak show, inviting people to get off on other people's pain ...
I am honoured to be invited by our respected Prime Minister Shri Narendrabhai Modi to join the 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.' I dedicate myself to this movement and will invite nine other leading Indians to join me in the 'Clean India' campaign.
As a songwriter, I do kind of look at 'Santa Monica' as a thing outside of itself, because it isn't just my song. This is a song a lot of people tell me is a part of their high school or college years. That means a lot to me.
My life - my personality, my habits, even my speech - is a combination of the books I choose to read, the people I choose to listen to, and the thoughts I choose to tolerate in my mind
We used to play a lot of Fela Kuti in the early days of hip-hop. In my DJ sets I'll jump off into rock, salsa, African. I like to play some crazy stuff and see the vibrations of the people.
When I started out, I wrote the songs, recorded the songs, mastered, mixed, did the artwork, made the packaging and did the distribution, all myself. Now I understand what everyone's jobs are, who is doing them right, and who isn't.
In hip-hop, I wasn't very focused on delivering a message. It was just a string of lines that didn't connect. What I wanted to do is write stories... and affect someone's emotions with that song. I think as a soul singer, I'm able to accomplish that.
I'd go to swim practice, put my face in the water, and I didn't have to talk to anybody. Swimming was like my escape, but it was also like this huge prison because I felt like I had to swim up to people's standards.
For me, the most enjoyable type of singing is opera. It allows you to move, to wear a costume... to do something with your body. When singing in concert, you have to stand up in front of the audience, next to the conductor, which is less natural.
Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. They're all full of subtext, and some of them are cliche and overused and vernacular. They're tricky. All I can say is, words are tricky.
I've always been fascinated and stared at maps for hours as a kid. I've especially been most intrigued by the uninhabited or lonelier places on the planet. Like Greenland, for instance, or just recently flying over Alaska and a chain of icy, mountain...
I mean, you still can't jump offstage and go read a book. But I'm getting better at it. It is something you can manage. You can still give everything you have to the audience onstage, and have something for yourself.
You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.
You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.
I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember.
I could never call myself an atheist; my parents could, quite happily. I always felt like there was a little bit more out there, and was always into observing the world from a slightly more spiritual, as opposed to scientific, perspective.
If you confine it, you're confining a whole thing. If you make it spontaneous, so that anything can happen, like we don't want to confine or restrict anything. What we can do, whatever we can let happen, you just let it happen.