I was married to a law student, and I used to attend classes with him at Georgetown University Law Center. Being of dramatic bent, I was drawn mainly to Criminal law and Evidence classes. A just-beginning writer, I would find an empty chair and liste...
They have what you call a black night where they have black people come in for just one night only to watch comedy, and you get all your local drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes, all of them come in, sit down, and listen to you tell jokes. They the har...
I don't think you should necessarily listen to a celebrity just because he is one. But if you can marshal your celebrity and really steep yourself in whatever issue you're trying to promote, it can actually move the ball forward, and we've done that.
It's really nice meeting people after a concert. Still, it's very weird to be at the center of a group of 30 people all listening to what you're saying. When that group turns into 300 people, it goes on from weird. Some people revel in it, and I don'...
Too lazy to be ambitious, I let the world take care of itself. Ten days' worth of rice in my bag; a bundle of twigs by the fireplace. Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment? Listening to the night rain on my roof, I sit comfortably, with both l...
I have to concentrate more intently when people speak. I always have to position myself on their right side so that I can hear out of my left ear. I sometimes get a crick in my neck from listening. But I don't there's too much else.
Those old adages - you attract more with honey; do unto others - are true. You can get attention by being acerbic or mean or making a bizarre comment. But by being nice, being empathetic, building relationships and listening, people begin to recogniz...
When you're writing you're constantly fighting demons to sit down and do what you do. If you listen to the voices outside your head, in addition to the ones inside your head, you'll never get anything done. There's enough inner strife.
It's a holistic process for me during a show. I'm always focusing on the technical aspects of my voice. I try to make my voice do what I want. One big thing I do to improve on each show is to listen back to performances on CD while on tour.
The first movie I ever saw was a blaxploitation movie. It was called 'Monkey Hustle.' Like I said, just listen to the name. That's a blaxploitation movie. It had these incredible, bigger-than-life images of people who looked like I did. Or who looked...
If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.
Listen, I'd rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!
I always take care to have interesting chord progressions, because you can have the best sound design in the club, and you'll kill it in the club, but in five years, kids will have better sound design. But if your music is good, you'll always be able...
What is certain is that singing is not merely modulating a song by means of the voice: we sing and we celebrate the beauty that we can grow and live every day. If you want to sing and give emotions to those who are listening, you must have something ...
Well, you can't throw heavy, analytical, thought-provoking songs at people 24/7. It's been my experience over the last 20 years that on a rare occasion, in a live setting, if you can slow people down to listen to two good ballads, then you're doing p...
Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that'...
When I turned 50, something clicked in my head and I said, 'I'm not going to live to 100. I'm half-cooked already.' I set the family down and I said, 'Listen everybody, we're now entering the decade of Daddy. We're going to start doing things that I ...
An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That's the beauty of it. It's not taxing to the listener's intelligence because...
When we hear the word 'beauty', we inevitably think that beauty belongs in a special elite realm where only the extraordinary dwells. Yet without realizing it, each day each one of us is visited by beauty. When you actually listen to people, it is su...
To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable tr...
Like all soul singers, I grew up singing in church but sometimes I would leave early and sit in the car listening to gospel band, The Blind Boys of Alabama. Hearing their lead singer Clarence made me connect the idea of church and show business and s...
