James Edward Olliges Jr. (Jim James) Quotes
I'd write songs like 'One Big Holiday,' and we'd play it and say, 'It's too heavy for 'At Dawn.' Let's save it for the next one.' We had more time for that, but when you mix a song, the general rule of thumb for us is a song a day or usually a day and a half.
Quotes to Explore
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You're only as good as your last song. That's something somebody told me, and it's so true. You've just gotta keep putting yourself out there, even promoting 'God Made Girls.'
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I'll never forget the first time... I got a Blackberry smartphone, and I'm playing with it and I'm going, 'This is really important because my email, my contacts, my calendar. Everything is here and it's synced up with that computer. It's synced up with my assistant's computer.'
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I act because it's the one time I'm sure of my identity. There's no doubt. It's on paper.
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What works for me is knowing the character in an emotional sense. I wish I was more logical but it doesn't work for me like that. I need quite a lot of time; it's why I always worry when I'm doing more than one thing at a time. I hope that some sort of magic will kick in.
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I have a hard time waiting for things to happen.
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My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.
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Being right half the time beats being half-right all the time.
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'Paper Planes' was an accident. It wasn't a song we made for the masses. It took two years to get popular, and there were many fights about censoring the gunshot sounds.
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Be reactionary. React to what the market wants. And the market wants one-on-one real time engagement. Now that we have the tools to engage, I'm going to continue fighting for the end user.
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I'd always loved strings. When I was in high school and saw strings playing on stage, an orchestra or a symphony, all those bows moving at the same time... wow.
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If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.
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I think feminism is that you just have to stick it all out. I remember this one time when someone interviewed me, and I was young, and they said, 'Do you see yourself as a feminist?' And I was like, 'I don't know. I'm not really comfortable calling myself a feminist.'
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The buzz you get when you're playing a song and everyone is screaming and dancing and what have you and singing along is incredible.
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Disasters are usually a good time to re-examine what we've done so far, what mistakes we've made, and what improvements should come next.
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If only I could step back into the time of old movies, if only I could be given the opportunity to do what Katharine Hepburn did or what Rosalind Russell did. Those kinds of characters, that kind of patter, that kind of language, that kind of script. They don't exist any more.
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To write a love song that might be able to make it on the radio, that is something that is terrifying to me. But I can definitely write a song about that chair over there. That I can do, but to sit and write a pop song out of the clear blue sky, that is very difficult and I admire the people that can do it.
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For a long time, I've had a recurring dream - I dream I don't have to write any more, that I'm free. I'm not free, alas; I'm still clearing the same terrain, with the impression that it's never finished.
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My girlfriend tells me if I'm doing a movie I'm a roller coaster of emotions all the time, but on 'Boardwalk,' because I've done it for so long and I'm so in tune with the character, she says I'm pretty happy most of the time.
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Everyone has an internal age, a time in life when one is, if not one's best, then at very least one's most authentic self. I always felt that my internal clock was calibrated somewhere between 47 and 53 years old.
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I don't have time to be negative.
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I played a lot of keyboards, but I really wanted to produce the sound that was in my head that I was trying to emulate on the keys. I wanted to do it for real. And it makes me look at the keys in a different way. So it's like I'm looking at the guitar and bass more like meat and potatoes and keys like coloring over top of it, you know.
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It is so fascinating that someone can commit their whole entire lifestyle to being such a fantastic woman when I'm such a bum about it.
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It's choice - not chance - that determines your destiny.
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I'd write songs like 'One Big Holiday,' and we'd play it and say, 'It's too heavy for 'At Dawn.' Let's save it for the next one.' We had more time for that, but when you mix a song, the general rule of thumb for us is a song a day or usually a day and a half.
