Irving Paul Lazar Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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It is hard to watch myself. I'm hypercritical, and it's difficult to watch a performance when I may end up being at odds with it - wishing I'd done something differently or that they had edited it a certain way.
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I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever.
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When you have that connection to say, 'I'm going to play for something bigger than myself,' man, you have a chance to do something good.
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I've made up little mantras for myself, catchphrases from a screenwriting book that doesn't exist. One is 'Write the movie you'd pay to go see.' Another is 'Never let a character tell me something that the camera can show me.'
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Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
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I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.
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I don't know if I've ever played a character who's close to me. There have been some elements of myself in different roles. Sometimes, I show one side of myself and then completely conceal the other.
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I submerged myself in all the information that I could find about Idi Amin. I mean, before I left Los Angeles, I was studying Kiswahili. I was working on the dialect. I was studying every documentary and tape of him that I could find - not just visual, but also audiocassettes, even in other languages when he was speaking in other dialects.
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Remixes are so much fun. For me, it's like this great release of energy. I like producing stuff for myself, but I also enjoy making music that wouldn't really suit my own vibe.
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I love talking about myself.
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For the last few years I've tried to force myself to write at least one page every day, which doesn't sound like much but it's actually pretty hard to manage. Because I'm not allowed to do a make-up day. I can't do two pages the next day. The punishment for not completing my page is that I have to eat a vegetarian meal the next day.
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I'm the youngest of four, but my closest sibling is 10 years older. I had a lot of imagination. I was running around playing little games by myself. But I never thought I was going to be an actor.
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I never set out to become 'famous.' I mean, when you're 14 you think 'I'm gonna become a writer and people will want my autograph and that'll be cool,' but you grow up and you learn that's just not how the world works. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never be published and if I did it probably wouldn't be a big deal.
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I did a play called 'On Golden Pond' in a dinner theater in Maine and then went to New York for a talent competition having put together a three-man juggling routine and some one-liners and I got myself an agent from that.
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I get 0.5 seconds to react to a ball, sometimes even less than that. I can't be thinking of what XYZ has said about me. I need to surrender myself to my natural instincts. My subconscious mind knows exactly what to do. It is trained to react. At home, my family doesn't discuss media coverage.
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I look at myself as an audience member. I still love movies, and I still go and sit in the back of the big dark room with everybody else, and I want the same thrill.
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You've heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain't never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that's because there's been so many can do it better'n I can, play the blues better'n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.
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Truth be told, actually, my favorite director of the Movie Brats was not Scorsese. Loved him. But my favorite director of the Movie Brats was Brian de Palma. I actually met De Palma right after I'd done 'Reservoir Dogs,' and I was very beside myself.
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I was always in a big hurry to do everything. Before I was 20, I was married twice and had two kids. But I don't regret any of it. I learned a lot about myself. I had a lot to say for someone my age, real early on.
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I always see myself as much more of a musician than a celebrity.
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I've learned to suck in my stomach when photographers are around. I used to read gossip magazines all the time, but I stopped when I started being written about in them and read incredible lies about myself.
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I'm ambitious. But if I weren't as talented as I am ambitious, I would be a gross monstrosity.
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God makes stars. I just produce them.
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I call myself a literary agent simply to distinguish myself from actors' agents.