You go to any Jay-Z concert, and he plays his hits. Comedians don't have hits. You have to have a whole brand-new hour. You have no hits to rely on. It's the hardest thing.
Whoever lives wins. Don't feel guilty about having survived. If you have time to be feeling guilty, work on living a day longer, a minute longer. And once in a while, remember the ones that died before you. That's good enough." Vol 1 Chap 4
Well, you know, I never want to feel like I have a set plan of what I'm supposed to do. I kind of like to go script by script, and if I like the character and like the story that's why I want to do a movie.
Once you lose your parents, you get this numbness, this feeling of having to really be able to connect yourself with someone. I depended on my brothers for that connection, but to have that feeling of being taken care of... I lost it when my parents ...
A lot of people want to not wear a tie when they go to a restaurant. They feel they don't have to wear a tie. I think it's kind of a statement they're making. I don't know what that statement is. I haven't quite figured that out yet.
I was in college in Washington, D.C. I did three years full-time. I did all my requirements, and my senior year was really a gut year. And I said, 'Law school will always be there.' I was in no hurry to get right into that.
I do a lot of research. For 'I Am Legend', I did a lot of research about survivors. If everybody is dead around you, how you can keep surviving. I went to the bookstore and found psychiatry books about survivors from the Holocaust.
You wanna do a lot of backstory for your character - as an actor, you wanna research that. But on the show, it's fun to remain in that naive place as you go along, and be able to continue to discover things about your character as the writers come up...
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.
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.
I worked with people I admire; Josh Lucas, who I'd worked with many many years ago on a pilot called The Class of 61 and Kurt Russell, and so there were a variety of different people that I enjoyed working with.
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.
Very little gets offered to me. I have to audition and bawl my eyes out. For 'Broadchurch,' the scene was Danny lying on the mortuary table. I can't remember the last audition I had where I didn't come out drenched in sweat, puffy-eyed.
When I was a kid, I always had a big thing for Dannii Minogue. Initially I liked Kylie, but I quickly moved on to Dannii. There was always something more alluring about her. I think I actually wrote to her asking if we could meet.
The biggest thing about me, as an actor, is I'm never a finished product, you know? I always want to try something or be in a new genre because, one, it's much more fun to do that because you're not doing the same thing over and over.
This is a career about images. It's celluloid; they last for ever. I'm a black woman from America. My people were slaves in America, and even though we're free on paper and in law, I'm not going to allow you to enslave me on film, in celluloid, for a...
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.
I'm a mammal at the end. I breathe out and breathe in and eat. At the end, when we go to sleep, nobody lives this political definition. It's something we connect by and we try to understand each other by, but at the end, we know that this is not who ...
