James Gray Quotes
I feel that The American Dream is this fallacy that you come to the United States and win lotto. That's a disservice to The American Dream because the American Dream is worth striving for. And it's not easy.
Quotes to Explore
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If you make a film too American, it won't travel. It will have no life outside of its own country.
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After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.
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America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college - the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes - the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That's what America is about.
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My dream as an actor growing up was always to challenge myself to different genres, different roles, and it's actually rare that an actor's given that opportunity to do that.
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The American school system's a little warped, so anyone can get a degree if they have a little money.
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It's really exciting to be able to represent the cruiserweights and go to Monday Night Raw. I grew up watching Monday Night Raw, and it's really a big dream of mine to perform on that stage.
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African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures.
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Every study on crime and or firearms proves time and time again, that 99.99999% of American gun owners do not commit crimes or use our firearms in any dangerous or improper way.
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I was a star in Italy, Austrailia, Germany and Japan before the American stations ever paid attention at all.
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There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
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One cannot understand what's happening to women in the Middle East if they don't realize that the mothers are a strong, progressive force. The mothers push the daughters to get out of the harem, to get the education, to achieve what they could not even dream of.
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Robert De Niro... It seemed like a pretty cool thing to do to put his name on my resume next.
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My great-grandfather fought with the Colonial Army in New England in the American Revolution.
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I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.
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I got into journalism not to be a journalist but to try to change American foreign policy. I'm a corny person. I was a dreamer predating my journalistic life, so I got into journalism as a means to try to change the world.
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Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself.
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Since Reagan there has been this tradition, which has become a cliche, of promising morning in America, this fake optimism, we're the best, the city on the hill. In fact the great American task is self-scrutiny.
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American couples have gone to such lengths to avoid the interference of in-laws that they have to pay marriage counselors to interfere between them.
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I like ambiguity because you may be the villain in someone else's story and the hero in your own, and I think very often, African-American characters are either one thing or the other. You shouldn't have to be perfectly good or perfectly bad. You don't even have to be magical.
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What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.
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The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad.
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Regarding Wikileaks, I have profound ambivalent feelings about it. I am a firm believer in a strong intelligence service. There's a need for classified information.
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Every country I've had different hit records, so we have to change the set to fit the country.
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I feel that The American Dream is this fallacy that you come to the United States and win lotto. That's a disservice to The American Dream because the American Dream is worth striving for. And it's not easy.
