Jessye Norman Quotes
I try to frighten my very young colleagues into studying and understanding their voices before they attempt things that are beyond them. It's wise to take gymnastics and swimming to strengthen the body, because people don't realise what an athletic undertaking singing actually is.
Quotes to Explore
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Of course people think Washington is arrogant. It is.
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I do look forward to keeping in touch with the guys, because we'll always be connected in people's minds.
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It's important for cinema to keep on evolving: for people, and not only teenagers, to be able to go to a movie that has huge epic scope but has an intellectual and real story to tell.
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My dad once said that in criminal law you see terrible people on their best behavior; in family law you see great people on their worst behavior.
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I've never been a six-foot-tall, skinny model, so therefore, I want to create an illusion. People always think I'm taller than I am - not just because of the shoes I wear but because of the way I dress. It's all relatively streamlined.
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But black people fall for that same argument, and they go around talking about law breakers. We did not make the laws in this country. We are neither morally nor legally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up, keep us down.
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My biggest nightmare is I'm driving home and get sick and go to hospital. I say: 'Please help me.' And the people say: 'Hey, you look like...' And I'm dying while they're wondering whether I'm Barbra Streisand.
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I come from Nigeria, and we live by the idea that it takes a village. So my entire team. I live by my team: my friends, my neighbors, my teachers - they're the people who taught me how to be a free actor.
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I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name.
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The thing you notice here after America is how refreshingly ordinary people look because they haven't had their chin wrapped around the back of their ears.
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Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined 'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
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I don't think of myself as a gearhead or a motorcyclist. I'm not that young, and this is like another life of mine. But the people I know from that era think of me that way.
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Some people have been listening to the Beatles their whole lives; I didn't discover them until I was 18 years old.
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I liked 'Star Wars,' but I wasn't an uberfan like many people are.
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There have been times I've planted stuff in songs where four years later I'll be singing it from a subconscious, kind of chameleon little lizard mind... and at a certain moment, all of a sudden, I'll hear a line from a different vantage point and it'll change its meaning. It's something I wrote but it changed because I did.
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Awards mean absolutely nothing if you don't get it. If you do get it, they're the best thing in the world.
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You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.
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It's a new challenge to see how people can change your look. I like words like transformation, reinvention, and chameleon. Because one word I don't like is predictable.
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Those people who wake up and they're just beautiful, they're just born that way. Well that ain't me. I gotta work for everything I've got.
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A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
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MacAllister commented recently that Plato was right, that democracy is mob rule, that the voters can be counted on consistently to find the candidate with the fewest scruples and put him in office.
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You can't turn up at college in stilettos and say you're gonna be a filmmaker. In the college, they were teaching me avant-garde filmmaking, where I had to make films that were, like, an hour long about nothing. I just refused to do it.
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There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
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I try to frighten my very young colleagues into studying and understanding their voices before they attempt things that are beyond them. It's wise to take gymnastics and swimming to strengthen the body, because people don't realise what an athletic undertaking singing actually is.
