American Quotes

What opera isn't violent? Two things happen, violence and love. And other than that, name something else. You can't.

We usually never got out of there before four or five o'clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.

We didn't have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free.

The only credit I can give them. They synchronize wonderful. That's all. They synchronize very - you would have thought that they were actually acting, but they were synching all the time, and that's a rough job.

That's what George wrote! He wrote it. Why change it? There was this European company that I was speaking about awhile ago - course, didn't nobody know what Porgy was.

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it, was all for my audience.

It's very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn't there. And I don't blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good.

I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were.

He was a silly guy. Out - do the other guy. That was his effort at all times.

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.

At times as a performer they segregated us in some of theatres.

A movie and a stage show are two entirely different things. A picture, you can do anything you want. Change it, cut out a scene, put in a scene, take a scene out. They don't do that on stage.

90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody's interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.

Bubbles was a very good dancer. Tremendous dancer. He was one of our leading dancers of the country at that time. And, of course, he didn't have much of a voice.

Your work isn't just to learn and say the lines. Your work is to figure out what the chatter in your brain is, that's going on under the lines. It doesn't matter whether you're speaking or not speaking because your mind is working the way your character's mind would work.

You don't take a job in acting at all expecting 25 years in and a pension.

Well, I do lie for a living. I'm an actor.

The rite of passage of learning to build a fire that will burn all night with one match is not an insignificant one in my husband's family, and I grew up camping and backpacking. I love to camp.

One thing that annoys me is when you see women in these terrible and incredible situations with perfectly glossed lips. You're not going to look good in the apocalypse.

My husband's family is military. Preparation is just, from that family perspective, it's just a part of what makes sense to do. You buy insurance for your house; you have a go bag.

Learning to shoot firearms to me is a little like driving stick - it seems like a decent skill to have.

I'm learning to hunt with rifles, because if you think about it, hunting gets you the healthiest meat - organic, free-range food. It's a totally yuppie spin on what I thought was kind of a redneck occupation.

I'm growing as an artist and expanding my range,and not pigeonholing myself by doing the same thing, over and over.

I watched Ricki Lake's documentary, 'The Business of Being Born,' and that led me to call a midwife, and not an ob-gyn, when I found out I had conceived. My delivery was not easy - they call it 'labor,' not 'a vacation!' - but I was incredibly grateful that I did it that way.

I think I'm probably much better at the boots and pocket knife thing than I am at the high heels and martini thing.

I love doing action scenes, there's that great thing when you sort of stop acting because if you're running, you're not acting like you're running, you are just actually running.

I don't watch horror movies because they scare me!

I am fascinated in religion and theology and what people believe.

Hospitals are great places, and you can learn from them, but you don't necessarily need to go in anytime you get the sniffles. And maybe you shouldn't treat pregnancy as a disease.