Were Quotes

When you're a little kid, you don't see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

I've made some great mistakes in my life, but, you know, they were honest mistakes.

You have to be really loyal to the people that supported you when you were coming up.

For a long time, I thought I was ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults that were not intended.

The thing I enjoyed most were visits from children. They did not want public office.

My father's parents were from Sardinia and my mother's from Barcelona.

When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.

How true Daddy's words were when he said: all children must look after their own upbringing. Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.

I believe that my children, who are young, will look back on the early years of the 21st century in rather the same way I look back on the middle of the 20th: as a time when seemingly respectable people supported discrimination against Americans simply because those Americans were different from themselves.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.

After I had my kids, I realized it's pretty much all about instinct - you have to do what's right for you. Everyone has an opinion, but it was all about what you do or don't do. I was so overloaded, so I let my children dictate the way things were supposed to go, and things fell into place.

There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.

It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society.

Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

Yes, in all my research, the greatest leaders looked inward and were able to tell a good story with authenticity and passion.

Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.

At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.

When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was, of course, the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that.

I was trying to convince all these men to try to make a product that they didn't even wear! Or if they did wear them, they were not admitting it! There was the problem right there. No wonder their hosiery was so uncomfortable.

Very ugly things were said about me.

Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.

I was in the Commons recently and saw a young lady wearing a nice pair of shoes. I said I liked them and she said my shoes were the reason she became involved in politics.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

My parents were what I like to call proper musical fans. Lots of Sondheim was played in the car.

I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films.