I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn't ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.
It's kind of like I'm Phil Spector, and I'm forcing a young girl to make pop music and perform exhaustively. Except, instead of it being someone else, that girl is also me.
Absolutely, I grew up listening to soul music. People like Stevie, Aretha, Ray Charles, Michael and Prince. My parents' record collection was all I had when I was a little kid. If it wasn't that, it was something else in their collection.
When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together in unison?
I don't think I thought I was going to go into music, and I don't think it hit me until I was 13 or 14, and then I was gone. Just like that. At that point, there was nothing else that could keep my attention.
The L.A. rap scene is popping again because rappers stopped saying 'West Coast.' Nobody says that anymore. Fans of L.A. music were reaching and saying, 'This is West Coast music,' because nobody else liked it.
Well, more than me saying to the rest of the country music industry there is not enough traditional country music - that is not necessarily the statement in truth. I think more so that I, me, missed it more than anything else.
I personally do not listen to a lot of music. It helps keep my mind free. I don't want to sound like someone else from the get-go. I want to express myself and the world in my head.
Once you've changed who you are or who you've portrayed in your music, the fans, they'll catch it... Once I feel like the world knows me for anything else but my music, then I feel like I failed.
I don't have a single complete show or movie or anything else that I could look at and say, 'Nailed that one.' But endless dissatisfaction is, I suppose, what gets us out of bed in the morning.
And if small businesspeople say they made it on their own, all they are saying is that nobody else worked seven days a week in their place. Nobody showed up in their place to open the door at five in the morning. Nobody did their thinking, and worryi...
Once, when a British Prime Minister sneezed, men half a world away would blow their noses. Now when a British Prime Minister sneezes nobody else will even say 'Bless You'.
There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude... we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves.
In the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That... was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about 'white men.'
If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and adopt, like anyone else.
To be honest, marriage doesn't scare me and that, it's just once you've been together for so long, if you haven't got any kids it's just a big expensive day out for everyone else to enjoy, isn't it?
I like to be someone else. I like to be someone other than myself. I grew up watching movies and being a fan of what I'd seen portrayed in the movies, and I always wanted to do that one day.
I was a scared kid... I think I was born a nervous wreck, and I think movies were one way to find a way transferring my own private horrors to everyone else's lives. It was less of an escape and more of an exorcism.
Juvenile Delinquent: If she drops her pen, pick it up, but don't look at her legs. Or else it will be on your record.
Eve Harrington: When you're a secretary in a brewery, it's pretty hard to make-believe you're anything else. Everything is beer.
Controller: I know but this guy has no flying experience at all. He's a menace to himself and everything else in the air... yes, birds too.
