Michael Cerveris Quotes
I studied voice at Yale with Blake Stern from the music school, and he had me singing German lieder and Italian songs.
Quotes to Explore
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Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way - everything is interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful mind is anger.
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Justice is revenge.
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You're dealing with all these foreign agents, foreign brushes, and different time zones. So, you have to put just as much work into taking that makeup off as you do into putting it on.
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We have to be careful not to have a form of militant secularism in our country, which is counter-productive for children we would like to see - adhere - to secularism.
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I think music needs danger; it needs risk.
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I didn't want to give up my Illinois driver's license and was unaware that was a crime. It is, by the way, in the state of California. Lesson learned. I technically broke a law, so technically I deserve whatever I get.
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Origin stories are really important to me. I just like that sort of stuff and I feel like it makes a lot of sense to the guys, who they are. If you don't have that stuff, it's kind of a one dimensional version of it.
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The Democratic Party is the party of the status quo.
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After engaging in acts of war against another nation, there exists a degree of uncertainty in terms of the enemy's reactions. War inspires an unpredictable psychology and evokes strong emotions that defy systems analysis quantification.
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There is a kind of misconception that Asian-Americans are not as American as European-Americans.
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History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know.
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I've always been able to just concoct a melody quite easily - it's just kind of instinct, really. You've got to channel your subconscious.
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I think it's great fun sometimes when I am playing golf, just to give it a little uch, is to bet the other guy five bucks a hole or something like that.
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I feel sure that no girl would go to the altar if she knew all.
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When you're in a relationship with a photographer, and they start abusing that relationship and being like, 'I want you to do this, and I want you to do that,' it makes you go, 'No.' I didn't want to work all the time.
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I drive a big Dodge truck. I drive American cars.
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I like being outside and working with the elements. The elemental aspects of it. The physicality of it.
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I get to go to all these beautiful places, so it's nice being able to take pictures of it.
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I was at the Apollo Theater all the time, skipping school, and I worked in a barbershop. That's how I started with doo-wop. Now I've come full circle. I did all kinds of music. I used to work on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley.
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I hate the phrase “One thing led to another”. What kind of lazy writing is that? Isn't it your job as a writer to tell me how that made this happen? “Adolf Hitler was rejected as a young man in his application to an art school. One thing led to anotherand the United States ended up dropping two atomic bombs on the sovereign nation of Japan”.
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The funny thing is, people's perceptions of what a song is about is usually wrong a majority of the time. But they're still going to read what they want to into it.
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I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.
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If I can't sing them myself, there's nothing better than writing songs for other people and watching them be performed. It's kind of more thrilling than doing it yourself.
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I studied voice at Yale with Blake Stern from the music school, and he had me singing German lieder and Italian songs.
