Jerry Seinfeld, NYT, February 28, 2010
"All marriages are based on a sitcom premise: What if you and I tried to stay together for the rest of our lives?"
Jeff Bridges, Rolling Stone, February 18 2010
"The kind of acting that I admire is where you can't see the wheels turning. People in real life don't try to show their feelings - they show them inadvertently."
"I prefer coming from an underdog position. Always. I don't like to say, 'Hey look what I'm going to do for you.'"
Larry David's character Boris in Woody Allen's "Whatever Works," 2009
"People make life so much worse than it has to be, and believe me it's a nightmare without their help."
"My story is: whatever works, as long as you don't hurt anybody."
50 Cent, Esquire, January 2010
"Always have bail money."
J Mays, Chief Designer at Ford, Esquire, January 2010
"They're not writing songs about cars anymore."
Jerry Lee Lewis, Esquire, January 2010
"I still got pretty hair. I'm still rocking. That's sitting on top of the world about as high as you're going to get."
Ornette Coleman, Esquire, January 2010
"The difference between sex and love...You're not always sure you're in love. But when you're having sex, there's really no mistaking it."
"I don't try to please when I play. I try to cure."
"I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke."
"How is it that something you care for would not let you love it?"
Sting, Esquire, January 2010
"I had a pretty miserable childhood but would I want to change it? No. Childhood made me who I am, and I'm quite happy with who I am. Without my childhood, something else would have happened."
James Spader, Esquire, January 2010
"I like to be wrong. I like to find something new."
Carl Reiner on Mel Brooks, WPost, 12/06/09
"[Mel's] a man of very strong tastes [and can't stand it when I eat onions] because he doesn't like onions and he judges everything on how it affects him."
Tom Petty, Rolling Stone, December 10, 2009
"I had an explosive side. It wasn't that easy to set me off. But when it happened, I lost it in a big way. I've learned to control that. But I had a tough childhood and took a lot of abuse. The rage was in me, and when it got away from me, I didn't know how to control it. But I could vent it in this music."
"I had a wonderful mother. She was a very kind, good person. My father was Jerry Lee Lewis if he didn't play the piano. He was scary and violent. He beat the living hell out of me and and there was constant verbal abuse. Looking back on it, he probably was disappointed that I was so drawn to the arts. make life so much worse than it has to be, and believe me it's a nightmare without their help."
Barry Levinson on Robert DeNiro, WPost, 12/06/09
"What makes him great as an actor and fascinating as an individual is that you can never figure the man out completely. He always seems to have a secret. You want to know more and you can't ever know enough."
Paul Taylor of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, NYT, 10/18/2009
"I've always needed a certain amount of solitude...I like people OK. It is just that I like being by myself."
Ted Danson's Character George on HBO's "Bored to Death" Finale, 2009
"It's good to stay in the dark about some things. Keeps life interesting."
Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 2009, Season X, Episode X
"I'm not used to giving people the benefit of the doubt. I'm not conditioned to doing it. Something told me, 'no don't do it, it's not for you.'"
Kevin Smith, Huffington Post, 10-05-09
"It's sad when you realize you can't be the angry young man anymore. The angry young man is barely ever interesting, and tolerable in his 20s. But his late 20s? Early 30s? God forbid late 30s? You can't anymore."
Elliott Gould, Esquire, October 2009
"There is no escape. There is no place to go. Our life is on earth."
"It is essential that I listen so I can try to minimize the problems I create for myself."
"For a kid - or for a repressed, inhibited shy person - to find out that you could have an effect on people by making a joke was interesting. So I would do that."
"It's not women who are tough. It's life."
"I live alone and that simplifies a lot."
"Whenever I die, that will be when I die. What's the big deal. I mean, if I just had some lentil soup, I'd rather not make a mess, but other than that, what's the big deal?"
"The best friend I ever had - I don't know that it's a who. 'What' would make more sense. Calm is a good friend of mine."
"I have persisted but without a ballpark, without a game, without a team. We go on."
Rosanne Cash, NYT, 10-04-09
"I was always dreamy, thinking about art and not knowing where to buy stamps. I have a terror of running out of stamps."
"I have regrets. I don't understand people who say they don't have any regrets."
John Cleese, NYT, 10-04-09
"As you get older you laugh less because you've heard the jokes before."
Merle Haggard, Rolling Stone, 10-01-09
In his songs, Haggard often portrays himself as a free-spirited rambler, but in life he's weighed down by a complicated personality - intelligent, ornery, contrary, impulsive, always curious, with a deep worrying streak. "I've never seen anybody who can take a light load and make it a major burden the way Merle can," his manager, Fuzzy Owen, has said. "Merle's a mood man," observes his pianist, Doug Colosio. "He lives in the moment. You never know where things are going - just that it's probably not somewhere you've been before.""I can get depressed real easy. My life is not as smooth as it might appear. There are secrets that I wish there weren't, and the glue - I'm the glue I guess, that keeps it all from falling apart."
Most of all he misses Johnny Cash. "We was more like brothers than the brothers we had. We understood each other's problems. He was the guy every macho guy in the world wanted to be, and he wasn't happy with himself at all. I'm a lot like that."
"I've shot myself in the foot plenty. I don't even have to look back at my career to see that - I can look down at my foot. But I'm just not one to give a lot of thought to the brilliant ways to make money. I guess you'd call me a lazy thinker in that particular area, but I think more about good songs and catching a big bass than I do about how to make money."
[While in prison] he found a way to escape from every single place he was locked up. Asked what motivated him, he shrugs, "I don't like to be told what to do."
From his wife: "It does him so much good not to think. He asked me, 'why would you want to not think?' I said 'Well you might want to give your mind a rest.'"
David Duchovny, Rolling Stone, 09-17-09
One of his favorite mottos, he says, is from Nietzsche - amor fati - love of fate. "Whatever happens to you, fall in love with it, because there's really no other option. You can decide to rail against the fates. You can think 'Oh, I'm a victim! or Woe is me!' But it happened. So love it. And see what the good is coming out of it."
Jeff Tweedy, Wilco Lead Singer, Rolling Stone 09-03-09
"I think it would be a waste of suffering if you don't gain wisdom or insight from it."
Actress Jane Lynch, NYT, 09-27-09
"I traveled within all the groups [in high school]. Started that pattern of don't stay long enough for anyone to get to know you, to see the chinks in your armor."
Eli Roth, New Yorker, 8/31/09
In response to Quentin Tarantino saying that Jews are willing to give a form of absolution. "The Jews are more angry about shit from 7,000 years ago than we were [when it happened] 7000 years ago. We never forget and we do not forgive. Those [referring to Tarantino's description] ain't my people."
Greg Allman, Rolling Stone, July 9 -23 2009
"To tell you the truth, it's my sixth marriage and i'm starting to think it's me."
Cornel West, Rolling Stone - 05-28-09
"I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of ideas."
Kris Kristofferson, Rolling Stone - 04-16-09
"I do wish I could take all the good moments of my life and spread 'em out like one every other year. It seems to that 'good times,' like the 'hard time,' come in bunches.
"Before he died, my father told me that 'I'll never understand what you have been doing with your life, but I do understand your NEED to do it."
On Johnny Cash, Uncut, February 2009
From his son: "My dad lived with pain his whole life. It was partially the way he was made, and partially the pain of addiction and partially the loss of his brother. His greatest pain was interior pain. But in the last 10 to 12 years of his life, physical pain took over. And you don't triumph over physical pain. Every day of his life he dealt with some sort of physical pain and for the last 10 years he as an abusive addict for the most part. He never stopped using substances."
Johnny Cash, Uncut, November 2008
"A record is just a recording of what you were doing that day. You don't wanna live the same day over and over again, now. Do ya?"
On Clay Felker, former editor of New York Magazine, in New York, August 2008
"Clay was not a monogamous person. It wasn't that he was such physically lustful male. It was that he really preferred women to men. I mean, without fuss or anything. He loved variety. Really, it was sort of in a not mean way - it was a harem mentality. I don't think he ever felt guilty about it. If he could keep the ball in the air so that he could be seeing three or four women at the same time, he was delighted. As I say, not that he was a great stud. He wasn't. But it was because he just loved seeing different women and having friendships and racing around."
John McEnroe, NYT, 08-24-08
"I'm not mellow, I'm mellower."
"I was always fighting the establishment, trying to run through brick walls. I don't have the angst I had."
From his wife: "He's an affectionate guy, a happy guy and man can he get freaking angry. He never goes off on meter maids. He just ices them. It's the worst. You don't want that wind blowing your way."
He definitely cares what people think. He definitely gets wounded. He just doesn't ever let what people think dictate what he does."
"I could have controlled [my temper] better. My parents always thought so. On some level I didn't control it because I didn't want to. But I took economics at Stanford, and it's the law of diminishing returns. I did feel out of control, and I didn't like it. Maybe what I like so much about what I do now is that I'm in control."
From brother Patrick: "Part of him enjoys chaos. He likes things to be a little unsettled. Wreaking havoc, what unsettles others, he can handle."
Snoop Dogg, Esquire, July 2008
"Love goes unappreciated a lot of times, but you still gotta keep giving it."
"A lot of people like to fool you you and say that you're not smart if you never went to college, but common sense rules over everything. That's what I learned from selling crack."
"Weed makes me feel the way I need to feel"
Keith Richards, GQ, April 2008
"I'm not calling myself wise. I refuse to grow up. But there are certain threads. Whether you connect the threads together, well...And really, there's nothing quite like having your kids or your grandkids or the people you know and love still say you're okay, because quite honestly, I don't know if I am or not. I mean, I'm just gonna do what I've got to do, and I've gotta live with the consequences, which I have quite often."
James Caan, Esquire, January 2008
"I never saw my dad cry. My son saw me cry. My dad never told me he loved me and consequently I told Scott I loved him every other minute. The point is, I'll make less mistakes than my dad, my sons hopefully will make less mistakes than me, and their sons will make less mistakes than their dads. And one of these days, maybe we'll raise a perfect Caan."
Sarah Silverman, Esquire, January 2008
"Jesus' words have become so perverted over time - it's been like a game of telephone. If he existed, he would fuckin' kill himself."
Chuck Berry, Esquire, January 2008
"I haven't been to church in 13 years, but I'm better prepared for heaven than most of those that haven't missed a day."
Peter Boyle, Esquire, January 2008
"When I was about to become a father, my friend Burgess Meredith said, 'You're gonna find something wonderful - someone you love more than yourself.' For self-centered people, it's a great blessing."
Mel Brooks, Esquire, January 2008
"You could never give your mother as much as she gave you."
Don Rickles, Esquire, January 2008
"No matter where you go in this world, you will always find a Jew sitting in the beach chair next to you."
"I used to play golf. I wanted to be a better player, but after a while I realized I'd always stink. And that's when I really started to enjoy the game."
Garry Shandling, Esquire, January 2008
"Tom Hanks seems to know exactly what he's doing."
Everyone at a party is uncomfortable. Knowing that makes me more comfortable."
"Some people can fake it their whole lives."
Carrie Fisher, Esquire, January 2008
"The older you get, the easier it is to spot the phonies. And I just think, how unpleasant for them."
"When you get on a manic run, you feel like you're a house burning down from the inside out. It's like having a bellyful of electric eels. Every ball you hit is out of the park. Every word you're searching for is right at the tip of your tongue. You look through the facts in your head, your library, your catalog of memories and experiences and information, and it's all there, everything. You have every connection before you even look for it. It's the best version of yourself, sold back to yourself on the cheap every minute every minute every minute."
Dustin Hoffman, Esquire, November 2007
"I became addicted to a derivative of morphine called Demerol. I;d been burned and was in the hospital for a month. When I was healing, everything was fine, and this yoke was lifted off me and there was this Zen feeling that people shoot for when they go into meditation. There was this sense of peace. I remember thinking: Why weren't we constructed this way?"
"I like to mimic my grandkids. I'm trying to understand the intensity of fixation on a leaf. Kids don't need anything else in their life."
Judd Apatow, NYT, May 27, 2007
"I was always last-picked for teams and it was devastating. I gravitated toward comedians because they were the ones who were pointing out hypocrisy and lying. I needed someone to tell me that it OK because I felt really bad."
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