Back Quotes

Loki in 'Thor' is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I'd built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.

We'll be back to our nature documentary, 'Baggy the Anorexic Elephant' in just a second.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

Sometimes before we make a record I go back and listen to a few. It's equally humbling and uplifting.

Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.

Music has always been my back door to life. It is important for people to find something that excites them. I like the concept that if you do what excites you, you will be rewarded generously, whatever form reward takes, which is not necessarily money.

If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don't back down.

The bottom line is, I tend to be going back to older and older music.

When I moved to New York, I fell head over heels back into country music and probably 'cause I missed something about Texas.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.

I've always liked country music. It's a certain aspect of America that goes back to the British Isles and the influence is very native to America.

That was a time when I did love music, I couldn't get enough of what was going on. Maybe it was Nirvana that brought me back. I guess it was a comfort because something that sounded so right - and non-commercial - had become so influential, so immediately.

For a person as obsessed with music as I am, I always hear a song in the back of my head, all the time, and that usually is my own tune. I've done that all my life.

Music's supposed to come from the heart. I felt like that if it ever got mechanical, I was going to back away from it.

I've never turned my back on country music.

Some mornings you wake up and think, gee I look handsome today. Other days I think, what am I doing in the movies? I wanna go back to Ireland and drive a forklift.

Thinking back to those earlier days, I felt I was weak when I wasn't making movies, and then when I was, I thought I was weak as a family member.

Sure, 'Twilight' is really huge right now and everybody's freaking out over it, but it will go away soon and I will be back to doing what I'm used to doing: weird little movies that nobody sees.

Movies are movies: they take you back in time, and how it still is for some.

It seems like the studios are either making giant blockbusters, or really super-small indies. And the mid-level films I grew up on, like 'Back to the Future' and all those John Hughes movies, the studios aren't doing. It's hard to get them on their feet.

John Barry was my hero when I was about 13. His scores to the James Bond movies were the scores of my life back then.

I like movies where you can come back and re-watch them and admire the cinematography 25 years later.

In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

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.

When we were doing 'Freaks and Geeks', I didn't quite understand how movies and TV worked, and I would improvise even if the camera wasn't on me. I thought I was helping the other actors by keeping them on their toes, but nobody appreciated it when I would trip them up. So I was improvising a little bit back then, but not in a productive way.

You can't knock somebody for how they got into the business. I'm sure I'm gonna look back at 'Roswell' and some of my first movies and I'm gonna cringe.

Back in the '70s, like one of my favorite movies ever was 'The Bad News Bears', and that was a kids' movie, but I don't think of it that way. I think of it as just a great movie because Walter Matthau was so funny and so harsh with those kids.

I think I have always tried to do the smaller films. I like to jump around and there is something really nice for acting in a smaller film. But I think now, Hollywood's movies certainly involve a younger generation for the most part and so... I love going back and forth.

So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point.

Well, it was actually - I brought the idea of doing a documentary to HBO back in 2000, when there were some press reports sort of were bandied about that there were going to TV movies based on some of the books that were out.