Tried Quotations | Page 4

I told everyone I would never be an actor. People used to tell me, 'Hey, you got a good look. You should try.' And I was like, 'Nah. That's not me.' And then, the moment I tried it, I found I loved it more than anything in the world, and that taught me a lesson. That is, just go for it.

When I first tried the American accent, for a moment I thought I could never be an actor because I just could not do it. But then I thought, 'Okay, it'll just be something that I work at until I get it.'

If I tried to start modeling right now, I wouldn't be a supermodel because it's all about celebrity.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

I've tried to be active in civic organizations as well as the Church.

The opposition tried to brand us as the 'Ground Zero megamosque.' The language was deliberately wordsmithed in order to arouse hostility against us. But the idea that the Jewish mayor of New York City and the president of the United States supported a mosque at Ground Zero, and took a lot of flak for it, raised their stature in the Muslim world.

I got caught stealing when I was a kid from the local bodega right across the street from where we lived. I tried to steal a big bag of Red Hot Dollars. And I swear, I was about 7 years old and the bag was bigger'n me.

Meditation had never been tried before in a medical center, so we had no idea whether mainstream Americans would accept a clinic whose foundation was intensive training in meditative discipline.

The idea behind the Anti Tour was people asking me how I would top the 'Aphrodite' tour... I thought the best option was to go completely the other way. I always tried to be that way - sometimes it works and sometimes you fall flat on your face.

I missed the Olympic team in 1996 - missed making the team. I tried to make a comeback in my sport, and soon after the Olympic trials, Johann Olav Koss, who is a Norwegian speed-skater, called me up and asked me to be a part of Olympic Aid. Now Olympic Aid is Right to Play. It's a wonderful, narrow focus.

I've always just shown up and tried to figure out what's for lunch and am I going to get to play some racquetball that night.

When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome.

People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.

Had Elijah Muhammad tried to introduce an orthodox form of Arab-oriented Islam, I doubt if he would have attracted 500 people, but he introduced a form of Islam that would communicate with the people he had to deal with. He was the king to those who had no king, and he was the messiah to those some people thought unworthy of a messiah.

My mom had me at 16 and took me every place she went. I remember going on peace marches. She tried to take me to Woodstock - it was pouring rain. It was on my birthday, and I was crying so much in the car they turned the car around and dumped me at my grandmother's house... I had a little attitude.

I'm not really a child of this '120 TV channels, a billion websites' era. I tried to live that for a long time but recently realized I don't get anything from it. I told myself it was luxury, but it was really only annoying. I'd rather just watch the same 50 movies over and over.

I'm a very shy person, and I never tried to do theater. I've been asked many, many times by the most incredible authors in America to do theater. And I always said no, not knowing what it is to be on the stage and to do theater.

There's that talent thing where I can score goals, and there's also that want and ambition to keep doing it and doing it and doing it. I've seen a lot of players do it for a year and then they rest on their laurels, but I've been very driven throughout my career. Without being the most talented, I think I've tried to make the most of it.

I've always tried to fight against, 'Oh, who's that small funny actress? Let's get her.'

Andy Gray is a great pundit and a great co-commentator. I couldn't co-commentate for love nor money. I've tried but I just can't do it, so as an all-rounder I'd say Andy's much better than I am.

My search for ways to improve my touch has never ended. We players tried a lot of different things and compared notes. Little fads would set in.

The challenge is how strange and different my voice sounds, so I have tried to sound like other people and tried to be something I wasn't. I have tried to be a soul singer because someone else thought that a good idea. Not because I did.

I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.

I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I've tried to really stress that.

Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease, even, so that if I start off undressed, I have nowhere to go.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

I was always the poor kid, even though I very much tried to pretend to be the other way. Always well presented. Always really active in the school, doing fashion shows, plays, involved in every single aspect of the school. Overcompensating, I think, for the fact that I knew I wouldn't be going on the ski trip every January.

Once, when I tried to calculate the height of the balcony, I broke my arm. Another time, I wanted to see if water moves faster than kerosene. When my father came out to smoke, a fire broke out.

Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women's movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There's no room for dissent.

Then I tried out for the Fontana High School drum line, in Riverside, and I did really well. I got second chair, and played snare in that drum line for three years.

Pretty much any time I got a chance to do something cool, I tried to grab for it, and that's where my solace comes from.

I'm a big fan of Justin Timberlake and Bruno Mars - that's my next level. You've got to dream. People have always tried to shoot me down for wanting to be a big worldwide star. But why not? You have to broaden your horizons and put yourself out there.

My mother often mailed me articles from 'Reader's Digest' about advances in DNA chemistry. No matter how I tried to explain it to her, she never grasped the concept that I could have been writing those articles, that something I had invented made most of those DNA discoveries possible.

Well, it's very easy for me to gain weight, but even though I tried not eating for a week when I was really young, I couldn't do it any longer because I liked my food too much.

We've tried to make a Superman movie where he does stuff and you go, 'Yeah, if I was Superman, that's what I'd do.' Even though he's an alien, he's more relatable, more human.

I go for a couple of parties; you won't find me at every film party and never at award ceremonies. I tried attending for the first three to four years, and I've performed at award shows. I sat in them, and I've also exited pretty fast from them. It's just not my place. I'd rather get their adulation in a cinema hall.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song together, and it wasn't that bad! The writing came natural to me.

I've tried to make 'Strictly Ballroom' impossible to date. It does feel a bit '80s but I consciously made sure there was no technology in the movie that could date it.

I've tried to recognize my wife's individuality, her personality, her desires, her background, her ambitions.

Everybody knew me as a gay man, and in my life in London, I never tried to hide.

I tried golf for a while, but I wasn't very good at it, so I didn't play a lot of golf. I enjoy all sports, not just football. I like basketball, baseball, and I got into the World Cup. So really, sports in general are my life, and football specifically.

I consider myself lucky that Sonu Nigam, Bikram Ghosh and Taufiq Quereshi came forward to create an original soundtrack to promote my book, something that hasn't been tried here before!

There's never been a song that I just wrote and tried to send to an artist.

When I was minister of sport in Brazil, I tried to bring in a law that would make the chairmen of clubs reveal their accounts like other businesses. It was turned down, but I think it is an important story that will make a good film.

I realized that I needed to be anonymous on the street and somebody else on the stage. I had tried to put my street self on the stage, but what they want is an actor on stage.

I don't know what it's like to be an arm amputee, or have even one flesh-and-bone leg, or to have cerebral palsy. I don't speak for such huge and diverse groups. What I've tried to do, what I've been fortunate to do, is to live my live and create my life as I've wanted to create it.

It's really important, whether you're a conservative or a liberal, to always challenge the conventional wisdom, which is what I've tried to do in all my work.

My first show was called 'I Know I've Been Changed' in '92. I tried to do this show for years and years. It kept failing over and over and over again. Every time I went out to do the show, nobody showed up. I was like, 'What is this about?'

I'm not going to beat the cancer. I tried really hard... but sometimes you're just not going to beat the thing... I wanted to walk off the stage and say anything I thought was important; I had my hour.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

'Donny and Marie' was a great experience. I tried so hard to be a great talk show host but it's all about relaxing and enjoying it. Marie and I finally figured that out. I would have liked it to continue but I'm kind of glad it's over because of the phenomenal workload.

I tried to be like the richer kids as much as I could because I wanted to live on their streets, at least hang out on their streets and eat their amazing food and walk barefoot on their shag carpets. I became something of a pest in that way, and in general, other people's parents didn't like me.

Faith is a personal matter, and should never be a cudgel to stifle inquiry. We tried that approach about 1,200 years ago. The experiment was called the Dark Ages.

I wanted to appeal to people who've never really listened to hip-hop or really given it a chance before. I've also tried to incorporate all my favorite lifestyle things in the music. Of course, 'Fashion Killa' is one of peoples' favorites because it just expresses how much I like fashion.

I never had a problem with my face on screen. I thought it is what it is, and I was turned off by actors and actresses that tried to keep themselves young.

Imagine if the dinosaurs had tried picturing the rulers of their planet 100 million years hence. They'd undoubtedly envision these creatures as... dinosaurs! Conceiving of aliens as polished versions of ourselves is appealing, but unconvincing.

The idea there were kids out there who didn't love to read and write just as much as I did struck me. So I went around schools and tried to make other kids love to read and write.

No support of one star or one director or one producer can make any individual actor a star. You have to connect with the audience; the audience have to like you. That is something that cannot be manipulated or fought for or tried for. Either they like you, or they don't.

I tried for a while to be an agricultural worker and was hopelessly bored. I would stand around in heaps of manure and sing about the beauty of the work I wasn't doing.

I tried to be a goth for a while. I'd pour baby powder on my face and paint my lips black, but that didn't last long. I thought I looked cool at the time. But then you look back and wonder, 'Why did anyone let me out of the house looking like that?'

If you're a waiter, the worst thing you can do is go to work resenting your job. This will sound trite - but it's the reality, and part of my personality - yet when I was a waiter, I tried to be the best waiter, and when I was a bingo-caller I tried to be the best bingo-caller.

After my time in Holland, an inner battle ensued in which I tried to free myself from the influence of Schinkelesque classicism.

I was a temp secretary for a long time, and I went at it with a passion, and I tried to do a nice job in all my jobs.

My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.

For me, journalism has been more a matter of projecting a particular approach to covering policies, to covering issues. It was a continuation of what I tried to do in government.

I gotta make a living. I make no bones about that. Most actors do. But within that context, I've never not tried to make something as fresh and alive as I possibly could make it.

My dad was my swim coach growing up, and I tried to get kicked out of practice every day. I was a little devil kid.

People say I've gone against Hollywood, but I've tried to be independent within Hollywood, tried to be my own person.

The history of the Internet is not, as some people have tried to make it, a libertarian just-so story. It is a messy tale in which the government played a significant role. That role was, however, far more subtle than the plans of industrial policy gurus or techno-boosting politicians.

There is a dark side in all of us. And for us 'bad' people, the bad side dominates. I think there is a great sadness in villains, and I have tried to put that across. We cannot stop ourselves doing what we are doing.

Following Michael Brown's death, I went to Ferguson and met with his parents. I stood with them as they tried to hold their heads high and deal with both their immense loss and the larger issues of police-community relations.

The Chinese government tried to keep a lid on the SARS crisis, but there were 160 million text messages in three days sent by Chinese citizens. These are early indications that it's going to be difficult for people who used to have control over the news to maintain that level of control.

I wanted a family, but before I had a family, I was a career person. I've tried to marry those two things, and sometimes it is successful, and sometimes it is not.

You have to keep a strong sense of who you really are - and I have a pretty strong sense of myself. It gets me in trouble when I say this, but I don't think of myself as a politician. I've always tried to be honest when communicating with people.

I tried piano, acting, and a bunch of things. My family let me do what I wanted to do; they made sure I had balance in my life because I was self-driven. Listen to your kid, encourage them, and make it fun.

One time, a burglar came to my apartment, so we called the police. My son was here, so I think they left before they tried to steal something. So the police come to my apartment, and they say, 'Oh my God, did they steal everything?' I was like, 'No, it was like that!'

I think we're all blessed with gifts and I was lucky I just found out what mine was early on and have planted that seed and tried to water it every day.

I tried for modelling work but it was a bit slow and that's when I took a part-time job at McDonalds. It gave me income while I was waiting for my big break and at the very least I could eat.

After I graduated, I tried Broadway, which was difficult for me. It was tough to get a part on Broadway, so I just started talking to audiences at different social gatherings, and little by little I became Don Rickles - whatever that is.

To have a great man for a friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.

With great artists like Elvis, sometimes the songs weren't the greatest thing about him. When I tried to perform some of the songs, I noticed some of the tunes weren't all that brilliant, but it was the performance that sold them.

In 1968, the sanitation workers of Memphis tried to form a union. The city resisted. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life.

After 'Rent,' I tried to make a record, and it didn't work out, and it was the Broadway community that welcomed me back. It's where I feel the most understood, most at home.

About the idea of a clash between cultures, between civilisations, I don't believe in it. It's something some political leaders tried to use, and that the media tried and are still trying to sell us, in order to simplify the world and their work.

Although the FCC has tried to introduce net neutrality rules to avoid abusive practices like favoring your own services over others, they have struggled because there has been more than one court case in which it was asserted the FCC didn't have the authority to punish ISPs for abusing their control over the broadband channel.

I'm proud that with 'Bright Eyes' we've always experimented and tried to make a different record every time out.

Would this country be better off if no one drank? Yes, it would be, but we tried that; it doesn't work. I don't want to tell anybody that they can't have as many drinks as they want every single night of the week as long as they don't get behind the wheel of a car.

When I was younger and women first started to get in public positions, in my case the law, we went through a period where we wore those little ribbon ties, little bows. We tried to figure out what was our appropriate dress.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

I think that's the thing I learned at 'Saturday Night Live' - any time I would try and strategize, I would always, always fall on my face. Things worked out when I tried to make it about what I was feeling at that moment and what I was into in that moment of my life.

It is still crazy to me that I have two boys born on the same exact day. I really tried to not have it happen, so they could each have their day, but there was no way around it.

I tried to get people at 'South Park' into 'Downton Abbey,' and it didn't work. I think they were like, 'Downton Abbey?' What?' And I kinda made a big plea in the writer's room, like, 'Guys, you should really watch it. It's good. It's addicting. My wife and I are obsessed with it.'

The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

You know, the Tea Party is a - first of all, it is a significant movement, and I think the media and some pundits have tried to write it off as a bunch of cranks or something. But, in fact, it's really a very legitimate and fairly significant swath of voters out there.

The 'Downward Spiral' album was a record all about beating everybody up - and then 'Hurt' was like a coda saying maybe I shouldn't have done that. But to make the song sound impenetrable because I thought it was a little too vulnerable, I tried to layer it in noise.

I tried to build a company my father would have been proud to work for, that he would have looked back on and said, 'That's the company that honoured me, even though I don't have an education'. I wanted to build a company that had a conscience.

When I was a little girl, my mother tried to make me dance, but I did not like it then.

In 'Changeling,' I tried to show something you'd never see nowadays - a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

the perception in the world was that they tried to strangle us. In Lebanon we violated this basic rule and we were unable to hold what we took.

We started slow, like we usually do, but we rushed things, and tried to force them when we needed to be more patient. The girls played hard, it just didn't happen.