Said Quotes

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

Because you know, down deep in my heart, when all is said and done, I still live under the illusion that basically people think of me as an up-and-coming young actor.

I'm an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was in my early 30's. Most of the people who wrote that who thought they were younger than me are now bald and wrinkled.

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

I think about my parents all the time, especially on Sunday when I'm at Mass. My mother always said, 'We do not pray to win elections. We pray for people's health, we pray that God's will be done, we pray that we do our best. But we do not pray to win elections.'

Like Lincoln, I would like to believe the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Then again, he said that before he got shot.

A lot of people don't know this, but when 'Dancing with the Stars' first asked me to be on the show, I said no, because I wanted to act and to be taken seriously.

They basically said that if I didn't show up for school they'd mark me present, they wouldn't send the truant officer after me. At 16 I enrolled in something called continuing education. Once a month I'd go out to Jamaica, but I didn't take it seriously.

That said, everything's important, and every musician who plays on the record is an integral part of it.

A girl phoned me the other day and said... 'Come on over, there's nobody home.' I went over. Nobody was home.

The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

My old manager of the Irish National Theatre said 'Don't worry about being a star, just worry about being a working actor. Just keep working.' I think that's really good advice.

Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

I contend that, in spite of all that might be said about Watergate, Richard Nixon was good for the poor people of America.

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

So he said 'I'm going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library.' I thought 'That's a turn-up for the books.'

There was some indecision as to when I was born. My sister said it was 1916. I'd lost my birth certificate.

It was stunning actually, because what you would hope for from our national leaders is some reflection, some understanding that the situation that we encountered in Iraq was not what we expected, that it was not what he said it would be.

From the sea came a boat with some Israeli commando soldiers who took me by the commando boat to the yacht and put me on the yacht. In the yacht I asked people, who are you. And they said we are Israelis, French and British.

My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him, family was everything. We could disagree inside the house, but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor, he looked sideways but said okay.

The idea in The Man that Would Be King was that the music should recreate all that majestic surrounding and emphasize the adventure, but also speak about the frustration or, rather said, the curse of both protagonists, even before happened what happens them.

When I was larger, people said I was fat. Now that I've lost weight, they say I died.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

My doctor said, for want of a better word, now that we've got medicines out here that can help, let's put you on one of them and say we're treating MS.

It's an album that is a little bit different and probably isn't easy to get out. It's not likely that a major label would have picked it up and said that they had a smash hit record.

What I've said in the past is that I want the Labour Party to approach this matter on the basis of unity.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

In justice to human society it may perhaps be said of almost all the polities and civil institutions in the world, however imperfect, that they have been founded in and carried on with very considerable wisdom.

I wanted to be a mechanic. When I was 14 I wanted to quit school and go work on my car. But my dad said Son, you shouldn't do that. You should stay in school until your education is finished, and when you're done, don't make your hobby your job.