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One of the things that was introduced to me at an early stage in life was to try to make stuff happen. But nothing ever worked that way for me. What I learned on my own was that to try and play God with your life will wreck your brain and your nervous system, and mess up your natural direction in the course that's already there...But look, I just don't want to read about me being made into a basket case because of my work. It's self-pity that I hate. I mean, it comes with the territory. An actor with any conviction goes the extra mile.
--
Movieline (1991)

 

River Phoenix

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"I hate analyzing stuff. I do the bare minimum. When it comes to interpretation, I just play it and go from there. I think emotion is everything. When you get the notes, you've just scratched the surface. The best things happen spontaneously, on stage. I'm doing three concerts here; I guarantee that none of them will be the same. We're not machines."

 

Sarah Chang

 

I'm actually a rather shy individual. I wouldn't consider myself to be very charismatic; I never did anything hero-like, I just worked on some little community programs. I do have a role to play however — I'm a theorist of sorts — I work on theories. But I really do not enjoy discussing the details of my personal life except as it relates to the movement. I hate cameras, microphones stuck up in my face. To tell you the truth, I hate stages cause they put you up on a stage and expect for you to entertain them and I keep trying to tell them I'm not an entertainer. Came to New York and I was supposed to speak at the Apollo Theater — 125th Street. And somebody called me, said, "Huey, we gonna have to cancel the rally. Somebody's gonna assassinate you from the balcony." I said, "Listen, if I'm ever foolish enough to get up on stage at the Apollo Theatre, they wouldn't need to assassinate me. That man will just come out and hook me off the stage." What's his name? The sandman? Yeah, the sandman cometh.

 

Huey P. Newton

 

If I wasn't an actor, I think I'd have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights. Art is a little bit larger than life — it's an exhalation of life and I think I you probably need a little touch of madness.

 

Laurence Olivier

 

If you look at the history of big obstacles in understanding our world, there's usually an intuitive assumption underlying them that's wrong. In the case of the Solar System it was intuitively obvious that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System and things moved around us, but that just turned out to be wrong. ... And it intuitively seems correct that the brain is just some sort of computer—it just seems natural. ... But it has undermined almost all of our work to build intelligent machines and understand thinking. It's just wrong ... the brain isn't like a computer at all.

 

Jeff Hawkins

 

"Film star," "movie star" — whatever they want to try to call you is limiting, in the sense that I think an actor has to be able to play characters. To separate these things — you know: "leading man," "action hero," "character actor," stuff like that — I guess if I want to be close to anything, it would be a character actor, which is what I think an actor should be. So any of that "movie star" stuff, I just don't buy it. It just doesn't make sense to me.

 

Johnny Depp