Stay true to your vision/dream. There's something to be said for just staying at what you are trying to achieve well past the point everyone else gives up.
The past is a stepping stone, not a millstone.
I wanted to write a very simple story about a boy, a wolf, a girl, a bear and a forest, so I thought I might set it in the past. I didn't realise that it went back to when I was 10: I used to love the Stone Age when I was a kid and wanted to live in it, and I got rid of my bed and slept on the floor, but I didn't remember it.
'Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.
Nothing beats weaving through the rush-hour traffic or whizzing past the eternal gridlock that is the Strand.
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
The people in the well-ordered ages of the past upheld the public law and abandoned private strategies; they focused their intentions and unified their conduct. Everything they did was for the sake of being employed by the ruler.
What's considered ideal in Hollywood is completely different than anywhere else in the world. I don't think you can aspire to it, nor can I. Everybody is retouched, stretched, lengthened, slimmed and trimmed. I could look at a picture of myself from the past and think, 'Why don't I look like that now?' It's because I never have!
My husband is stricken with dementia, and it's a trick of his condition that events and people from his past are more real to him than what happened five minutes ago.
Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?
The striking thing about love and will in our day is that, whereas in the past they were always held up to us as the answer to life's predicaments, they have now themselves become the problem.
Stripe was very much the product of our past experiences.
I found with this record I had to really be strong-willed, because in the past I've tended to tinker and add a thing or take a thing away, and nearly always been wrong.
It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.
I stumbled upon Charles White purely by chance while looking through a book 'Great Negroes, Past and Present' in the library at Forty-Ninth Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. I was in the fifth grade.
Rebecca Black might sing like a robot, but that's just proof she has evolved beyond us. Her vocal is just a slightly exaggerated version of the robot glitch-twitch stutter that's been mainstream pop vocalese for the past 10 years or so.
The wind industry has made major strides over the past two decades, and they have proven their industry to be efficient and self-sustainable. There is no need for the taxpayer to continue to subsidize a wind start-up tax credit.
Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that 'many of us have a road that reaches back into our past'. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 - as he subtitles his book, the 'Highway to the Sun'.
A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.
I think typically you'd start in a supporting role or an ensemble role, or maybe even an off-Broadway role. So to come into a lead role on Broadway, especially taking over a role that has been played by two phenomenal actors in the past, that is some large shoes to fill.
