Quotes

If you spend your whole life being depressed about life, you're wasting it.

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.

The antagonisms between men and women express themselves in the most delicate phase of their life together - in their sexual relationship.

The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us... While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

I didn't really make up my mind to be an actor until I did 'The Hitcher' with Rutger Hauer. I was about 17 or 18 when I did that, by which point I'd probably done a dozen or more movies or TV things, but 'The Hitcher' was the experience that made me want to study and commit and learn how to do this for my life.

It is not often that idealism of student days finds adequate opportunity for expression in the later life of manhood.

Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it, was all for my audience.

You go your whole life for one moment that boils down to a race that lasts a couple seconds.

Swimming's been a part of my life very much so since around age 4, and I never really dropped it.

Your whole life boils down to a moment that will take 20-40 seconds. How crazy is that? And it's every four years. I wouldn't tell myself that during the meet, but it's terrifying. A lot of it boils down to a very precise moment in the universe, and that just happens to be the Olympics.

The beginning of a career is hard for many players, often because of the ordinary day-to-day problems that football and life bring.

I do believe every artwork has its own charisma. Sometimes it's different from what I expect. When a work is finished, it exudes its own charisma and lives its life independently.

My mom put me into dance classes, found out that I can't dance to save my life.

I grew up watching my parents work in the fields. That's where I get my work ethic from, because I saw them work hard my whole life.

My life is calm. Once I get home from practice, I just want to spend time with my family.

I've been playing piano my whole life, but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made, really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand.

I think I was very lucky to have grown up with an artist's studio in the house. It was a kind of life that was possible. Yeah, it made it kind of harder because the standards were higher, but there was no pressure.

I'm not particularly interested in painting, per se. I'm interested in a painting that has that mysterious life to it. Anything that doesn't partake of that magic is halfway dead - it returns to its physical elements, it's just paint and canvas.

Going around not fully believing that you're going to die is really problematic because it affects how you think about the future of the planet, about the future of your own life, about the decisions you're making.

'School of Rock' was just once in a lifetime things; I want to be a doctor, actually. I'd go an do the sequel if they asked me to.

I can honestly say that my abortion was one of the least difficult decisions of my life. I'm not being flippant when I say it took me longer to decide what worktops to have in the kitchen than whether I was prepared to spend the rest of my life being responsible for a further human being.

I don't regret not going to college. Students learn up to the age of 21, then stop. I'll always be learning - the things that really matter in life. How to sign on, how to get free food, how to be streetwise.