Took Quotations | Page 5

Success took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor.

Myself, I happen to be married to an African-American woman, and we're together 17 years. We took a few trips to the South 15 years ago, and we were sobered by some of the reactions people had - how subtle or not-so-subtle their reactions were.

People misinterpret my emotions towards Nirvana because I've said things about how something happened with grunge that took a little bit of fun out of things. It's no offense to Nirvana; they were one of the greats, obviously. But something died there, too, and we haven't quite gotten the groove back.

If every woman who's had an abortion took tomorrow off in protest, America would grind to a halt. And that would be symbolic: because women grind to a halt if they are not in control of their fertility.

I've been reading about Crazy Horse and Custer for a long, long time, and I thought that if I was going to write a story that took place in the Black Hills, I should find a way to include this history in it.

We'd just go to church and sing. My dad would get me and my sister Doris, and we would sing together. I sung the harmony, and my sister Doris took the lead.

Today, grass-roots Republicans want to drink a bottle of 2010 small-government wine, but our candidates were bottled in another era, before the tea party's ideas took root.

'Frankenstein' was all about the idea that, through electricity and the destruction of night, man creating light and darkness, we took on god-like powers and then abused them like gods, and we are only men. That's a story about man making a man in his own image. The inversion of natural order.

Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I'd done even years ago doing people. I couldn't get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.

I am very emotional. It took me many years to recover from the death of my father. Even when I was playing cricket, I wasn't happy. I would just sit and cry. I was very young. He was too young; he shouldn't have gone. Cricket is all right. We all play sport. Good and bad days come.

I'd say I was a tomboy... I took wood shop in high school and I was very into volleyball and football, and was very unaware of anything girly for a long time.

I thought the '60s was the most exciting time and the most vital music, and we were really together as one mind then. Then afterwards, the songs and the bad drugs, that took its toll.

Growing up, I had really bad skin. I had a skin disorder. Yes, I did. And my mother went to great lengths to try to find something to remedy it. I remember she took a trip to Madagascar and came back with all these alternative, medicinal herbs and stuff. They didn't smell so good, but I think they worked some magic.

And they asked me to take a polygraph as to the allegations and reports I'd made. I volunteered and I took the polygraph and passed it without a glitch.

I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years.

Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn't - he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere - much more Calvinistic, more neurotic - it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.

I've got to sing for Pops; I've got to keep my father's legacy alive because he started all of this. So I started calling people, and nobody would give me a chance, but I didn't let that stop me. I took money out the bank and I started making me a record, and I did it in this guy's basement.

I'm a single parent, and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the traveling involved in making movies. So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn't miss it.

Despite his NFL pedigree, Clay Matthews had to fight every step of the way to get to the NFL. Once there, he's had a unique appreciation of what it took to succeed.

We were very happy when a South African court, which had previously ruled against us, took another look and decided that this material was not obscene and allowed it into the country.

I don't know anybody who said, 'I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,' or 'Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.' That's not what people want to talk about. It's not what influences people in one profession or another.

Some of the kimonos took as long as four to five months to make, with all the layers that go into it.

Regret is the worst human emotion. If you took another road, you might have fallen off a cliff. I'm content.

But it took me awhile to figure out Christine at this age, you know.

When I was six years old, my parents took me to this farmers' market with a petting zoo. They put me on a pony and, for some reason, it took off at a run and they had to chase it down. They tell me it was kind of traumatic.

My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.

When I was a kid, we didn't have any blues stations. I never heard Howlin' Wolf or Muddy Waters or any of those people until the Stones had come along, and I took it upon myself to find out who these people were that they were covering.

The thing that is cool about my come up is that I dealt with fame and having money gradually. It didn't happen overnight. It was something that took a while to happen. It was something that humbled me and made me very appreciative of my blessings more than I would have been if it had happened faster and easier.

Going from idea to production is a huge hurdle. It took me a while to overcome it. It's basically all about self discipline, right?

Playing for 14 years definitely took its toll mentally. I decided when I was playing my last season that when I retired from football I would never go back into it, and I've never regretted that decision.

I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

Mother Teresa's detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans' destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless. In the context of lost causes, Mother Teresa took on battles she knew she could win. Taken together, it seems to me, the criticisms of her work do not undermine or topple her overall achievement.

I've never had a chance to sit down and enjoy what's happened - I've been too panicked about the next move. So I took some time out. I thought either I do this now or in 10 years' time I'll end up in the Priory.

I took a political stance early on, but I don't think my work is overtly political. I respond to events.

I didn't know that my son had allergies until he spit up eggs one day, and one day he had a little peanut butter and his face swelled up. I took him to get tested and found out that he is allergic to everything.

I didn't ever think of it as a social thing at the time. I took it as a good story. Maybe because I've always been kind of progressive so I never thought of it, you know.

I started 'SNL,' and I became the one who did impressions. I did that, but then I wanted to get an original character on, and that took a long time to get one on that stuck. And then I got Vinny Vedecci on - 'Oh great' - and then it took a couple more seasons to get Greg the Alien on. You have to have some patience.

The Bible is big in my teaching. It's a wonder the ACLU didn't get after me pretty good. I really kept thinking they would. I took my boys to church. I took my football team to church. I only did it two times a year. Before I signed a kid, I'd write the parents and I'd tell that parent we were gong to take your son to church twice.

Much of the aid we first gave to Russia we took away from what we promised Britain. So in a sense, Britain participated in a very real way in the recovery of Russia.

In the forensic science course I took at university they used photographs of dead bodies. For ballistics they showed us a guy lying on the floor, and his head had burst.

My parents took me around the world when I was young, so I caught the bug. Every person is different when he travels, and every travellers' story is uniquely his own.

'Just What I Am' took me all of 10 minutes to make. 'Immortal' maybe took 30 minutes. It's not hard for me. 'Indicud' is almost what my first album should have sounded like, had I really been able to channel all of the ideas I had into music.

I took music theory for one year in high school and flunked all but one six-week period. That's because I couldn't read music, and the rest of the class was already eight or nine years into it. The teacher would sit down and hit a ten-fingered chord on the piano and you had to write all the notes down in about ten seconds. I just couldn't do it.

Long time ago, people would make the Bible, right? The guy said it, somebody wrote it down. And then if you wanted another copy of it, another human being wrote another one. It took a long, long time. Somebody created this thing called mimeograph paper and so you said, 'OK, we'll do it that way.' And so you could get three of them.

I took ballet dancing forever, and there was a natural transition into acting.

I wasn't the most confident of cooks, but I just persevered, and I wanted to learn, and I wanted to be a sponge, and I wanted to be better than the next person, and I wanted to learn as much as I could, so I just kept pushing, and it took me a long time actually to be confident in my technique and my ability as a cook.

My father worked for the railroad, and whenever a train crashed, we would go as a family and steal food from the boxcars. One year we stole a case of butterscotch pudding that was for export to Israel. It took us years to get through.

I loved the study of psychology. I didn't love seeing patient after patient. I was perpetually overstimulated, busy decoding everything I took in.

My parents wanted me to be a doctor. So I took up science, but then realised that my heart was not in it at all. The thought of treating ailing people was very depressing.

You could do a scene that takes 15 hours, but in the movie, it's only 10 minutes. The scene where they put the sauce poisoning in; it took eight hours.

I never got lessons. I took influence from Chet Baker, Ian Dury, and Joe Strummer. I don't hear my voice and think, 'Yeah, that's a banging voice!' It's more about putting the right emotions into the right words and the lyrics than anything else to me.

Animals arrived, liked the look of the place, took up their quarters, settled down, spread, and flourished. They didn't bother themselves about the past - they never do; they're too busy.

I'm riding my man Obama. I think he's a visionary. Actually, Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was 'Do the Right Thing.' I said, Thank God I made it. Otherwise you would have taken her to 'Soul Man.' Michelle would have been like 'What's wrong with this brother?'

I've always resented the force of attraction that traps me here on Planet Earth. It makes me feel like a bug stuck to a piece of duct tape. Ever since my teenage years, when I used to read a lot of science fiction and took it much too seriously, I've dreamed of somehow reaching escape velocity. I am, you might say, anti-gravity.

It took us three months to finish the arrangement of 'Thunderstruck.'

I admire Virginia Woolf so much that I wonder why I don't like her more. She makes the inner things real, she does illumine, and she makes relationships realities as well as people. But I remember the intensity, the thrill, with which I read 'Passage to India.' How I would have hated anyone who took the book away from me.

The most difficult part of playing Christ was that I had to keep up the image around the clock. As soon as the picture finished, I returned home to Sweden and tried to find my old self. It took six months to get back to normal.

My aunt took me to see 'Salad Days' when I was seven. This story of a magic piano that infects everyone who hears it infected me, too. It was a Road to Damascus moment in my life.

My character in 'Cocktail' was different from my personality. Homi Adajania took me to London, showed me how girls dress and behave there. I had not seen that kind of lifestyle before.

They are very healthy. Yes, they were sucking and breathing on their own and everything when they came out. So there was no need to stay in the hospital. So we took them home the next day.

All the time I was writing hit songs with my partner David Porter, I always had the yen to perform. Sure did. And when the opportunity came, I took it. The first album, 'Presenting Isaac Hayes,' didn't do so hot, but it was like a prelude for what was to come.

I think it is very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible on a highly secret matter. I mentioned it to you shortly after you took office but have not urged it since on account of the pressure you have been under.

I never took an acting class, so I've made all my mistakes on film.

It took 23 years from Abraxane being conceived to us showing now with conclusiveness that it works in pancreatic cancer. We cannot afford as a society to wait another 23 years to make sure that the patients get the right care, at the right time, at the right place.

When I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist, pretty much to the left. But not when I left the university. I quickly got wise. I'd read about what had happened to Russia in 1917 when the Communists took over.

'Paper Planes' was an accident. It wasn't a song we made for the masses. It took two years to get popular, and there were many fights about censoring the gunshot sounds.

It took me about 10 years to get rid of. I'm all right now, though, lovely, I'm throwing some nice darts at the moment, but every now and then I get a bit of a jump. I wish I could find a cure, I'd make a bloody fortune.

That was my fear, which is why when I was took over a book, I was always trying to tweak it a little bit so that it looked like I was trying to add something instead of keeping the status quo.

In general, I'm pretty shy and nervous about a lot of things. For me to get on stage for the first time took so many times at an open mic before I finally got on stage and did it.

When I realised that I had feelings for men as well as women, at first I was worried and frightened, and there was a certain amount of 'Who am I? Am I a criminal?' and so on. It took me a long time to come to terms with myself. Those were painful years - painful then and painful to look back on.

My little girl, Anja, is really excited. We had a baby shower yesterday and she took the presents from everyone for me and was telling them, 'No, it's my baby.'

I quit 'Magnum' to have a family. It took a long time to get off the train, but I try very hard to have balance, and this ranch has helped me do that.

I always wanted to be a professional athlete, it just took me a while to realise it would be in racing. I played field hockey competitively for Ontario since I was 13, 14. Then I tried for the national side and made it. But it was so competitive. The girls were just so big and strong. I was getting crushed.

Took us a great amount of strength to get them into the world, and for them to be in the world. I think that their little spirits, you know, just said, well, we're going to be there. So it makes it very special because of it.

They kind of took it out of our hands. We're still able to deal with him on an emotional level.

When I first started cooking, I was very much an intuitive cook when it came to taste, but that didn't mean I didn't want to know why some things worked and why others did not. My interest took me to culinary school.

To be honest, I never went to school for acting, and I never learned to break down a script. I took acting classes my whole life, but they never taught me anything about acting. They just taught me about myself.

I have a big box of autographs. I took photographs of me and Marlene Dietrich, me and Ida Lupino. I took pictures of Myrna Loy and Joel McCrea in front of the studios. I loved Hollywood. I have 500 autographs and 500 photographs I took.

When I grew up, my father taught us the value of hard work. He wanted us to enjoy ourselves, but he also wanted to know what it took to be successful. He coached a lot of our sports teams growing up. We weren't very good, but we learned about hard work and enjoying life and your teammates.

I was always very silly and never took myself seriously. When my father had the camera out, I'd be up close and annoying. My father would keep saying, 'Move back! Move back!'

But ultimately what I was impressed by during my years in government was how much the intellectual climate and the prevailing intellectual notions constrained and represented the universe within which the discourse took place.

'Beyond the Lights' took incredible fight to get made. Four years of writing and two years of overcoming 'no.' Every studio balked. Twice. But I kept fighting. What gave me the courage was 'Love & Basketball.' Every studio turned down that film, too. But I never gave up because I believed in it with my whole heart and soul.

At 17, I already had responsibility because I took care of my family, but in the football I was young; I wasn't experienced or the captain - I was just in the team.

I made my drama teacher cry. I only took drama to get out of writing papers in English and the teacher was this thespian Broadway geek and here I was this Italian guy from Staten Island and I would put her in tears.

I jumped off a cliff backwards for 'I Am Number Four,' which was pretty cool. I'd never done that before. It took seven takes from different angles and luckily there were no injuries. I came close, though. My head nearly hit the rock at one point.

As an adult, I took ballet classes three times a week, and I believed it gave me better posture, a stronger body, and made me more graceful.

I really kill myself on titles, although 'The 5th Wave' seems like an obvious title, doesn't it? You don't know how long that took me.

The United States is a proud, determined, hard-working, talented, patriotic nation and people, and it is not over-extended in the manner of empires of the past that took over the lands of others and eventually collapsed under the weight of the over-ambitious hegemon.

I took a job at a white-shoe NYC law firm, with an office, business cards, and a fat starter paycheck.

After 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again.

I took a trip in 2004, a year after the war started in Iraq. I played music on the streets of Baghdad for Iraqi civilians. I'd also play for U.S. soldiers at night when they were off duty in the bars. Then I would talk to people, and I would film them and ask them about their life and the conflict.

I dropped out of high school when I was, like, 15, so I just focused on doing music. It's all I wanted to do; I didn't want to work or anything else. I took all the negativity and obstacles that came with life, and I just put it in the music.

Playing a positive role on a network television show, it was great. I took it as a responsibility. Poncherello was supposed to be Poncherelli, and then when I got this part I said, 'You know what, this guy isn't going to be Italian-American, he's gonna be Hispanic American.' And they went with it.

Once I got a record contract, and I took my songs which weren't quite finished, or maybe they were a good idea, maybe they weren't. I took them into the studio and developed them. They came to life and they evolved... and they're great.

The thing about games is, players often say they don't care about story, but then if you took the story out, what would their reaction be? If no one cared about story, we'd all still be playing Pac-Man. There's nothing wrong with Pac-Man, but the point is, there's a genre of games in which you want to become part of that world.

The way I found time to write 'The Imperfectionists' was that I took work as a copy editor at the 'International Herald Tribune' in Paris, working full-time for approximately six months, then taking my savings from that and writing full-time, then returning after six months, and so on, until the book was done!

Eventually I did that, but it took a lot of twists and turns, and there were a year or two there where I was living with no money at all - no home, no car, no nothing. I was living in somebody's garage in Los Angeles at that point - for a year.

One time I got dressed in all black, Rambo-style, and took a massive pair of bolt-cutters and nicked a military bike.

There's a huge cost in being bipartisan, a tradition started by Newt Gingrich when he took over the House in 1994 and has continued forward, that you dare not vote against the Republican Party even if you're voting against your own initiatives and your own interests.

It took a while for the first 'Blade' to get made, and Marvel decided they liked the Whistler character so much, when Blade guest starred on the 'Spider-Man' cartoon, they put Whistler on the cartoon, and the movie hadn't come out yet.