Listening Quotes
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When I started out as an actor, I thought, Here's what I have to say; how shall I say it? I began to understand that what I do in the scene is not as important as what happens between me and the other person. And listening is what lets it happen. It's almost always the other person who causes you to say what you say next. You don't have to figure out how you'll say it. You have to listen so simply, so innocently, that the other person brings about a change in you that makes you say it and informs the way you say it.
Alan Alda
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I remembered Elizabeth had never laughed once during our talk. I feel that she hasn't learned how. The great house is so still and lonely and laughterless. It looks dull and gloomy even now when the world is a riot of autumn color. Little Elizabeth is doing too much listening to lost whispers.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
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If I do three interviews in a day, I can be exhausted, because the process of hearing everyone requires that I empty out myself. While I'm listening, my own judgments and prejudices certainly come up. But I know I won't get anything unless I get those things out of the way.
Anna Deavere Smith
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I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
Philip Levine
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I was never a troublemaker, but I also was never a nerdy kid. I was never a cool kid or a sports kid. At lunchtimes, I never fit in with any cliques, so I'd end up just walking around the school by myself, listening to music.
Finn Jones
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I had a brother six years older than me, so I wasn't just listening to teenybopper stuff. My brother had the cooler music, but my parents had the Burt Bacharach, Tom Jones, the Association, the Fifth Dimension; these groups were un-cool, but I secretly loved them.
Jill Sobule
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I find it quite difficult to think that there's, you know, about 20 million people listening to my album that I wrote very selfishly to get over a breakup. I didn't write it being that it's going to be a hit.
Adele
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What Alvin figured out was that when you’re Making, you don’t use people like tools. You don’t wear them out to achieve your purpose. You wear yourself out helping them achieve theirs. You wear yourself out teaching and guiding, persuading and listening to advice and letting folks persuade you, when it happens they’re right.
Orson Scott Card
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I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.
John Francis
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You need a pulse in a film. If I see a film that doesn't have rhythm, it's like listening to music that doesn't have rhythm; it doesn't really work.
Joe Wright
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Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
Jeanette Winterson
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I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening.
Carmen Agra Deedy
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I spent many a summer early morning with the radio very low, half sleeping and half listening.
Frankie Valli
Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons
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My brother was listening to his transistor radio. He kept switching the earpiece from one ear to the other, which I thought was his idea of a joke. 'You can't do that,' I said. 'You can only hear out of one ear.' 'No, I can hear out of both,' he answered. And that was how I discovered I was deaf in my right ear.
Jane Lynch
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If you listen to really deep ambient records that don't move too much, very still records, long after those records are finished, you might find yourself listening for hours to the sound of the room.
Bill Laswell
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You don't need 30 million people to listen to your podcast. If 10,000 people listen to your podcast, which is not a hard number to achieve, then 10,000 people are listening, and you can build a community, and literally change the world just recording into a microphone.
Chris Hardwick
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The thing that's been most important to me is being interactive with people that are listening to my music.
Kelsea Ballerini
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People of color grow up steeped in 'white' culture. The reverse is not true. And, no, listening to hip-hop on the way to work does not count as immersion.
John Ridley
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Comedy is like music - there are genres and styles for every taste. Katy Perry is there for people who like frothy pop music. Metallica is there for people who like head-banging metal. And Susan Boyle is there for... well, I don't who the hell is listening to that freak of nature, but that's not the point. In art, there's something for everybody.
Lisa Lampanelli
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We have been listening year after year to [white people] and what have we got? We are not even allowed to think for ourselves. "I know what is best for you," but they don't know what is best for us! It is time now to let them know what they owe us, and they owe us a great deal.
Fannie Lou Hamer
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In the old days, before there was such a thing as film schools, directors learned the camera by watching other directors, and learning from their own dailies, and listening to the cameraman, and seeing what would work. Some of those guys could cut their movies in their head.
Don Ameche
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I found myself thinking about the distance between the 60s and today through certain moments. Like the Henry Flynt interview with Ubuweb founder Kenny Goldsmith, where he talks about how he was scarred by how proud John Cage was to be ignorant of popular music. Goldsmith says, "Nobody thinks twice nowadays about listening to everything!" Something that had seemed so uniquely, radically syncretistic in Flynt's day seems much more commonplace now.
David Grubbs
