At school, I'd sing in groups in the locker room or in the bathroom, which was like an echo chamber. The problem is I didn't know how to get started singing professionally. The pool hall was my Facebook. I'd hang out there to keep up with what was go...
When you're a professional you do your job no matter what gets in the way. You might take a sick day, you might take a personal day, but then you show back up or you won't get paid. Everyone develops his/her own strategy for dealing with days that ar...
My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor...
I still get called 'a stick of dynamite' or 'pint-sized dynamo,' stuff like that. Actually, I was too busy to notice there was anything unusual about being a woman director until the early 1980s, when I looked around the professional theater and real...
Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools an...
However many reproductions I might supply, illustrations taken out of the apparatus of the individual bound book can never convey the bookishness of a book, the pace and scale and satisfaction of it, no more than a fish scale can substitute for a rea...
I'm a professional geologist, an explorationist for oil. That's what I've done in my career, one that's culminated in - at least to this point - playing a part in finding the largest field in the last 40 years anywhere in the world. That's the Bakken...
Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in whi...
I had danced with Janet Jackson and P. Diddy so I had done a bunch of hip hop. Really and truly my roots are in modern and ballet but, professionally, that's not really out there any more, unfortunately, so these artists aren't really having a lot of...
The law is so complex and voluminous that no one, not even the most knowledgeable lawyer, can understand it all. Moreover, lawyers and legal scholars have not gone out of their way to make the law accessible to the ordinary person. Just the opposite:...
Well, I don't know about objectivity, but I know for certain that it's always possible for a professional journalist who understands what he or she's up to to be fair, and that's the key word. Fairness to individuals, fairness to ideas, and to issues...
My brother Trev went to the Professional Performing Arts School in New York, and he used to do his monologues and stuff and rehearse in our apartment. So I used to hear him all the time doing these things over and over and over. And when I was a litt...
Because acting was my only professional outlet, I put a ton of pressure on the roles that I did. I overstepped my bounds, I tried to control things that were out of my purview as an actor and in some cases even tried to direct my scenes because I fel...
Salvatore Maroni: [Batman holds him out over a ledge] From one professional to another, if you're trying to scare somebody, pick a better spot. From this height, the fall wouldn't kill me. Batman: I'm counting on it. [he drops Maroni off the ledge, b...
Stansfield: You're a Mozart fan. I love him too. I looooove Mozart! He was Austrian you know? But for this kind of work, [imitates playing the piano] Stansfield: he's a little bit light. So I tend to go for the heavier guys. Check out Brahms. He's go...
Léon: I took a hit. I need a hand now. I know she's young, but she learns fast. Kids need to be shaped into something right? Tony: Yeah, I know. I taught you that. But ain't there an age limit? Léon: She's 18. Tony: Oh, really?
[first lines] Jordan Belfort: [in an ad] The world of investing can be a jungle. Bulls. Bears. Danger at every turn. That's why we at Stratton Oakmont pride ourselves on being the best. Trained professionals to guide you through the financial wildern...
Floyd Gondolli: This here's the future. Videotape tells the truth. Jack Horner: Wait a minute. You come into my house, my party, to tell me about the future? That the future is tape, videotape, and not film? That it's amateurs and not professionals? ...
When I was a child, it was my dream to be a professional footballer. When I was 14 I visited Milan's San Siro stadium and remember thinking how unbelievable it was. From then onwards I vowed that one day I would be playing there - and I am very proud...
I can only guess that, for guys in their 30s and 40s who watched me play, they understood that the score never mattered and my paycheck never mattered (in relation) to how I played. I played with Little League enthusiasm and professional flair. That'...
I used to say to myself, 'Well, in the old days everybody danced because they loved to dance, and there was none of this professional garbage going on about how much can you get for this or that or the other, or any of the kinds of things that insecu...
