I have a few pieces that I got for my birthdays or that I bought for myself: I acquire things that speak to me and put them on my wall. When I see things I like, I just know.
When your mother asks, "Do you want a piece of advice?" it's a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway.
I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'
One of the members of the group, I can't remember which one, found out we were making $3 - $5,000 a night. We were getting a hundred dollars a week a piece. Everybody got upset about it.
I'm not really frightened by experimenting - that's the main thing. I really like mixing very old beautiful pieces that are from thrift shops or that have some historical value with quite new futuristic things.
The worst story I ever wrote was after the conviction of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay. My co-author and I wrote a piece for 'Fortune' saying everything's going to be different now.
Because there are so many shows on and because I've been so hands-on - I've had a piece on almost every single week - I don't know how to cut back on that. You really can't.
As I'm writing, certain things become clear to me and certain things begin to feel right and make sense. The pieces start to fall into place.
I see girls who haven't had a carbohydrate in three years. The second you go back to eating right, you're going to put that weight on. You eat one piece of bread and you are screwed, lady!
Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.
When I was a kid it was big news when someone flew around the world in a little aeroplane, but nobody cared when I did it. Then, to rub salt into my wounds, the customs people ripped my aeroplane to pieces, looking for stuff.
The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
I have Tom Ford, Gucci, Saint Laurent, McQueen, and odd pieces that I've just acquired because I happened to have come across them and felt they have some historical resonance.
I try to read everything that's sent me - play scripts, movie scripts - but I've had to make a rule. If the author hasn't grabbed me by Page 25, the piece goes back with a note of apology.
Your love should never be offered to the mouth of a Stranger / Only to someone who has the valor and daring to cut pieces of their soul off with a knife / Then weave them into a blanket to protect you.
Iron which is brought near a spiral of copper wire, traversed by an electrical current, becomes magnetic, and then attracts other pieces of iron, or a suitably placed steel magnet.
There was this enormous burst of sculptural creative juice in the nineteenth century, and all that stuff is just so decorative. Even in pieces cast from a mold, you get a more sensuous, handmade, individual sense from it.
Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.
Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.
Filmmaking is finding a piece of granite and you start to chip away and then you have the shape of a head, the shape of the arm, you can see the shape of the face and the face starts to gather character. You have to find it.
Dixie has just fallen to pieces. There are little patches of Dixie. But even in the heart of Dixie - in Alabama - Dixie is slipping. They've stopped using the word in commercial listings.
