Took Quotations | Page 3

I had cleavage that would make Dolly Parton proud. But those things are really heavy and I'm pretty slight of frame, so I took them out. No one even noticed.

I feel like I grew up being babysat by a television, and all I ever wanted to do was be in movies, direct movies, make movies, but it took me a really long time to be honest with myself about it because my background is that my family was very poor.

In 2007, when my husband Damian Woetzel took on the artistic direction at the Vail Valley International Dance Festival, we both felt it was important to offer the entire Vail community access to dance.

I once took the key off my girlfriend's key ring so that I could surprise her when she got home. So I did this whole romantic setup in our bedroom with flowers and rose petals. She was so mad when she got home, but then when she walked in, she was so surprised.

I grew up in Iowa, and the improv comedy club Comedy-Sportz across the river in Illinois held auditions. They took me even though I was only 16 - you really had to be 18, but they never checked me for ID.

History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know.

It took me a couple years to get over the stereotype I was letting myself get caught up on, being a football player trying to start a career in music.

Drew Barrymore's Guess shoot took place as she was making the transition to serious actress after having been more known as a child actress who had become overwhelmed by the Hollywood lifestyle.

'Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

Previously, young children had to be shown by their parents how to use a mouse or a remote, and the connection between what they were doing with their hand and what was happening on the screen took some time to grasp. But with the iPad, the connection is obvious, even to toddlers.

I began photographing in 1946. Before that, I was a painter and drawer, with my mother and father's support. They were a bit pissed when I went into photography. They thought photographers were guys who took pictures at weddings.

Last Friday night, I Twitted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle. Once I realized I posted to Twitter I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked. I then continued with that story, to stick to that story which was a hugely regrettable mistake.

Hollywood loves pre-validation. Even if someone has a property that was first published as a comic book that sold only 5,000 copies, for Hollywood, that is a stamp of approval. 'Oh, it was already published in another medium? Must be good!' They get assurance from knowing that someone else already took the risk.

I wrestled with my Catholicism for a long time. It took a long time to escape. It began with a sense that it was repressive, stern, judgmental. It was passionate, but it was terrifying. There were individual priests and nuns who were helpful, but the religion was cold.

It took me all my life to learn how to salt a tomato.

If you can prove to me that one miracle took place, I will believe he is a just God who damned us all because a woman ate an apple.

In 1945, at the beginning of the Cold War, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the Cold War as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945 - before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism.

I took a clown class at NYU - that's where I met June Diane Raphael, my writing partner and best friend.

I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.

My chutzpah was me singing to Mario Lanza. So Mario looked at me after I talk-sang 'Be My Love' for the first time; he took the lyric out of my hand as contemptuously as you can take a lyric out of someone's hand, and he sang 'Be My Love' back at me.

I played football; I was a running back, and I took a hit, and I had a hairline fracture in my leg which no one spotted, and I was playing basketball all winter and it got worse. And then I was long jumping, about 20 feet, and I landed one time and there was this big crack, and all the bones were jutting out of my leg.

My auntie Anne took me to 'Phantom of the Opera' in London. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

I didn't believe when I was first told that I have cancer. I thought, 'How can a young person like me get cancer?' I thought it could never happen to me. It took me a while to realise that I was diagnosed with cancer.

It took them only an instant to cut of that head, but it is unlikely that a hundred years will suffice to reproduce a singular one.

With its missed lines and falling tombstones, 'Dark Shadows' was sometimes inadvertently funny, but what made the show work was the fact that the actors and the writers took it all very seriously.

I can't help but recall my dad and mom. Depression era kids, 8th and 9th grade educations, clawed and scratched to make a living as dairy farmers their whole life. At least two drought cycles nearly took it all away. They just worked harder, longer... and they made it.

I don't even like to talk about it. I hated being a number and not merely because I was a very small one. I let them bellow at me for just as long as it took me to find enough pluck to bellow back at them.

It wasn't until the Apple Macintosh that people understood what true hardware-software integration was about. It took one company to line it up: low-cost hardware, cool graphics, third-party products built on top of it, in an all-in-one attractive package that was accessible to consumer marketing.

I mean, I would have loved to have kept on being a big television star. If that's the way things would have broke, I would have loved to have done that. I just didn't really want to continue and be someone who took whatever was offered.

'PhotoCard' has 20 times as much code as the sum of 'QuickDraw,' 'MacPaint,' and 'HyperCard.' It is more elaborate and complicated, with all the client and server stuff. It took a lot more of me to do this than other projects, requiring an almost Mother Teresa dedication to do it.

The Giraffe took the horse's head and led him along on the most level parts of the road towards the railway station, and two or three chaps went along to help get the sick man into the train.

All was well, until I reached the port of Havre. Three officers with the rank of lieutenant, whom afterwards I knew to be Scotland Yard men, came aboard and demanded to see my papers which they took away from me.

And I went through a lot of detours and I took a lot of roads and things so yes, that's all there, but it's not meant to be shocking or telltale.

For the last four or five years, I had been in the position where I didn't have to take a pilot. I took this one because the script and the people were terrific. It never frightened me. As we were doing the pilot, I could tell that it was working.

I think I just took a while to know myself. I went on a journey to find out. I was a bit wild.

I refused to do a lot on mobile Internet until around 2009. But because we didn't start early, it took us some time to figure out what's the important thing, what's the most relevant thing for Baidu.

I don't remember ever deciding to become a performer. I just always was. I began performing by mimicking the performers on the new television that first took the attention away from me as the baby of the household. I continued performing to put a smile on my grandmother's face and always considered her when accepting or declining roles.

I took up boxing as a fitness thing. I got obsessed, and I would go every day when I wasn't working. It's just an insane sport when you get into it.

It took many years to accept that fantasy is the fuel for my storytelling passion, and without that, I really am a hack, writing for money or approval rather than for the pure delight of storytelling.

My first published novel, 'American Rust,' took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

I'd taken the bull by the horns by liberating myself and creating a career. It took guts - it was scary and chancy - but they discounted me as empty-headed: some little piece of fluff without any brain that happened to come along.

You kind of took it for granted around the Yankees that there was always going to be baseball in October.

I rewrote it and I took all your notes. Read it again, that kind of persistence paid off.

When we took Netscape public, if people wanted to invest in the web, that was the only stock that they could do it by investing in. So Netscape's market value was higher than it probably otherwise would have been if there were lots of other ways to play that theme.

I had to spend a few years learning how to do movies. I wasn't really good at that. I was a theatre actor first and foremost. So I took my time learning that.

I was so low that I wanted to exit. And I took a bunch of pills, and they were sleeping pills. And at least they would put me to sleep, and maybe I wouldn't wake up, and that was fine.

Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more.

People took part in the referendum because they were tired of the war. They are afraid of talking about it out loud, but they have shown exactly where they stand: Yes, we want peace, and we want to be a part of Russia.

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

You know what? I did a lot of things that were deliberate, and they all backfired. I was trying desperately to become Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler, and it did not work for me. I took a lot of leaps that I shouldn't have, traditionally speaking. I paid the price for that. I was not as hire-able for a while. But then I just gave all that up.

Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody.

Our forefathers got it; they got it, man. They took godly principles and they put them into action, and they developed our Constitution - the land of freedom where each man is accountable and responsible for his actions.

As a child, I was raised by native Hawaiian elders - three old women who took care of me while my parents worked.

I starved and slept on park benches. I wrapped myself in the pages of my manuscript to keep warm. For two and a half years I took odd jobs; nothing was going to deter me.

'Impressionism' was the name given to a certain form of observation when Monet, not content with using his eyes to see what things were or what they looked like as everybody had done before him, turned his attention to noting what took place on his own retina (as an oculist would test his own vision).

Kristina, my wife, and I thought about this one day when the kids were, of course, watching television. And we took a big blanket and put it in the backyard and said, 'Let's go out on our back and look at the sky and call it sky television.' We saw all kinds of things.

This drama between Dean and Ehrlichman took place while I was trying to give the contents to the FBI.

When we took on the name The Drifters, we became the new Drifters, and signed a contract to be put on salary, which I think was like a hundred dollars a week, a piece, five hundred dollars for all five of us.

I learned mainly through television, but I learned how to do mosaic, where you can buy stones or things of that nature. But also where you bust the tile to decorate pots for flowers or table tops. Lots of different things. Wherever you want it, you can mosaic just about anything. It took me about two weeks to do a big birdbath.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

I'm from Canada, and New Zealand feels like you took all the best bits of Canada and squished them onto a tiny island like Hawaii. I was absolutely blown away by the beauty of the South Island.

When I moved to New York at 22, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I took an improv class, and the first scene I did, I felt like 'I want to do this for the rest of my life.' It was the first time I ever felt like that about anything. I tried to make a living off improv.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

My mother took me to a lot of operas and when I was eight I got the opportunity to be in one and I realized that transformation into these make-believe situations was possible. I decided that was essentially what I wanted to do with my life.

I do make a good ragu pasta, which everyone seems to like. Or that could be just me talking; who knows what they really think. I actually stole the recipe from my older sister Vera, who also loves to cook. I took all my recipes from her.

What took time for my mom was getting the pronouns right and calling me by a different name. Laverne was my middle name before I transitioned.

My sister married an American and took his name, and my brother has shortened Sayrafiezadeh to Sayraf. So now he's Jacob Sayraf, or sometimes Jake Sayraf. He made the change when he was a teenager, prior to the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. So I don't think it was motivated by any anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States.

I was 16 before I met another passionate collector. One summer, I visited England; a new friend took me calling on his dotty, brilliant old aunt. She occupied a quaint house in Kent. Its walls were lined with glass-fronted cases full of what? Ancient shoe buckles.

In 'The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow,' part of the 'Dear America' series, I took my childhood bravery and stubbornness and put that at the core of the Navajo girl, Sarah Nita. It helped me to identify with her survival and to write about her courageous journey and that of her people.

It took me 10 years to realize that I don't know 'em, 10 years to realize that it's possible to learn them, then another 10 years to learn how to do things.

Even President Bush has cited the need to outlaw the practice of corporations making loans to their officers. Strangely enough, when the President was a corporate officer, he took out several loans from the company.

My father's father wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper and aspired to be a playwright. We had in our house a couple of crazy unproduced plays that he had written. For the one creative writing class I took in my life, I didn't do any writing - I decided that I would plagiarize his terrible play to not fail the class.

Race and gender definitely came up, occasionally, in my life at work. But the bigger challenge that I had was age. I took roles earlier in my career than people expected, and so a lot of what I got was, 'Do you actually know enough to do this?'

Leaving the record companies tweaked something inside me and I realised I don't have to deal with labels to make something happen. If I want to meet someone, I don't have to go through the label - I'll just go to them. I took my life in my hands and social media has just helped me do that more.

One of the first things a British visitor to Southern California discovers is that he must have a car. Freeways. Bad public transport. I took driving lessons.

During my jury selection process, we went through over 360 jurors. It took six months, all New York residents. Of the 360 jurors, over half of them had been mugged one time. Quite a number of them, maybe 30 40, 50, had been mugged twice.

I have an older son, Josh, and growing up, he just didn't care that much for baseball. And that was fine. But Chaddie, he always wanted to go to the ballpark. He just kind of took to it right away.

I had a great life even before 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' took off. I really enjoy teaching.

I tried to develop some theories that took account of the uncertainty in the world and the complexity in the world.

When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.

I spent 2010-2012 in Stockholm, trying to figure things out. I caught up on life! At the end of 2012, the relationship I was in ended, and I took the first plane to L.A. where my Swedish label has been setting up base. I felt so much more inspired to write and record than I had ever been, and the songs just started coming.

My mother had early-onset Alzheimer's, and it took her four years to die. She was only 44; I was 14.

So it took me five years because in the interim I have been doing a lot of personal appearances and movies and some television series that went into the plumbing and I stopped writing for a while.

I took piano lessons as a kid, and my daughter's played piano since before she started kindergarten, so classical piano is something I really love.

I reached a point where I'd watched enough directors do the job that I felt I understood it. And it's not that I'm a slow learner and it took me this long; I also was enjoying writing, and I still enjoy writing - I get tremendous satisfaction out of the writing end of it.

I guess I had a suspicion of it my entire life without knowing exactly what it was - knowing that there was something different about me, which I attributed to being an artist. At 11 or 12 I started sort of clarifying for myself. It took a while.

I, and others like me - trap stars - we always considered ourselves Robin Hoods: we go out and get the money. Just think, if you was in the village and you a hunter, you take pride in going out to hunt the prey and bring it back for the village to eat. In our situation, we took pride in getting money so that the hood could eat.

My career was quite unusual, so my main advice to someone interested in a career similar to my own is to remain open to change and new opportunities. I like to tell students that the jobs I took after my Ph.D. were not in existence only a few years before.

Sundance took me on my first film and from there sort of launched my career.

We took dancehall and hip-hop and mixed it in the middle. I knew we had something. I thought, 'This sound is Puerto Rican sound.'

It took me a long time to understand the relationship between ideas and between objective facts. But after I clearly understood this relationship, I didn't fool around with other wild ideas. That is one of the main reasons why I just make my scheme as simple as possible.

I took one class at Second City called Improv for Actors, and that was it, and that was only because my agent told me I had to.

It once amused me that it took me three tries to pass my driver's test and that my driving instructor told my mother that I was the least talented person behind the wheel that she had ever taught.

It took them a while to catch on that Batman would be the greatest.

Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.

I have lived with passion and in a hurry, trying to accomplish too many things. I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year, and I took care of her at home until she died in my arms in December of 1992.

My mother's belief in spiritual healers grew stronger after our family went through a rough patch following my father's death. Sufi saint Karimullah Shah Kadri changed our lives, and all of us converted to Sufism. But it wasn't an instantaneous decision - it took us 10 years to convert. The change in religion was like washing away the past.

The defense of the West Bank by Arab forces would be a truly suicidal enterprise. The late King Hussein understood these facts well. Until 1967, he was careful to keep most of his forces east of the Jordan River. When he momentarily forgot these realities in 1967, it took Israel just three days of fighting to remind him of them.

If I took the 40 years of my dad talking to me about war and battles and taking me to battlefields and distilled it down into one question, it would probably be the idea of the necessary or unnecessary war.