Were Quotes

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.

I wear black skinny-fit jeans - I can't get away from them. It's funny because I wore baggy jeans for ages, then one day my friend convinced me to try on a skinny pair and I thought they were great.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

It's no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment.

A friend is, as it were, a second self.

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that.

So many dot-com companies were formulated on air.

I feel like my peers now are artists like Madonna and the Stones, Michael Jackson and Prince. These are people who were able to take their careers beyond the normal here-today-gone-tomorrow life span.

If you look at my life, generally, I've been put in situations which were difficult and which I conquered.

I've made movies that I thought were good. I've made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you're in a movie and you think, I wish more people saw that - because you're good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that's show business.

Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.

If I were the blushing kind, I would blush to be called a hero.

I started, actually, to make my first animated cartoon in 1920. Of course, they were very crude things then and I used sort of little puppet things.

I like the George Romero films, which were really great, social satire movies; really twisted.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

I had a difficult time hearing my own inner voice about what I wanted to be in this life, because there were all these perfect examples of what a man actually does. The notion is that he goes to college, gets married and provides. That's what a man does.

I was a hop-around. I hung out with the rockabilly crew, the guys who were trying to be rappers, the funny kids.

Redemption just means you just make a change in your life and you try to do right, versus what you were doing, which was wrong.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

You become very angry and depressed that you keep getting offered only these exceedingly demure and repressed roles. They're so not me. That's why films like Fight Club were so important to me because I think I confounded certain stereotypes and limited perceptions of what I could do as an actress.

If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

A lot of the motivation for doing the 'Make 'Em Laugh' on SNL was because I had just finished shooting 'Inception,' where there were zero-gravity scenes and I got into really good shape and was training and did all these stunts. Coming off of that, that instilled me with the confidence to do 'Make 'Em Laugh.'

I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song 'Radio Gaga.'

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

Most of the people who call me a sellout were 7 when I was down face-first in the punk trenches.

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.

The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.