Quotes About Impressions

When we go to the cinema, we bring all of our preconceptions of actors with us.

The interesting thing is, when you play a real-life character or someone based in a book, you always come up against people's preconceptions of what they have in their heads.

The idea of interviewing someone is that you are getting their first off-the-cuff impression or response. You don't want them to have the chance to really prepare.

I didn't really know what to expect. I had been told about the scale of Cannes, but nothing could have prepared me for just how many people would turn out for our photo calls or for the opening ceremony.

For me, acting is a series of impressions rather than trying to find one line through to the end, which risks becoming more of a presentation.

I would like to say I do some pretty good impressions. I'm also one of the best basketball players in the world. I just chose not to go the NBA route, but people say I'm better than Kobe and LeBron.

I met Amy Winehouse a few times and she was always funny, charming and self-deprecating - just a delight to be around.

I've done literally 100, 150 different characters. Some of them have only appeared for a line or three. But the point is, every sound I can make has been harvested.

I've done literally 100, 150 different characters.

As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.

I love doing impressions of politicians because the task is always to imagine the private lives of these people whose job it is to project an image of staunch, unflinching leadership and grace, and that's just not how human beings, in their heart of hearts, work.

If you stop and think about who was in the 'Lassie' movies, it's difficult to think who was in them, apart from Elizabeth Taylor. You remember the dog, not the people! So if you're going to be in a movie, and it's called 'Gremlins', it's going to be about Gremlins, and what people are going to remember are the Gremlins.

I learned by listening to other people sing and doing impressions of them. And there are things no one can ever teach you, like phrasing. By listening to Sinatra, for instance - you felt that everything he sang had happened in his life.

The house I got them spotted for looks really great after they've first looked at a couple of dumps.

A holiday cocktail party is where some stranger will learn more about you in an hour than your spouse has learned in a lifetime.

Normally, if we pay attention to people's behavior, we are in a rush to fit their actions into categories and to hurry to conclusions, so we settle for the judgment that suits our own preconceptions. Or we accept their self-serving explanations. The Laws will rid you of this habit by making it clear how easy it is to misread people and how deceptive first impressions can be.

Romantic Quality always correlated with instantaneous impressions. Square Quality always involved multiple considerations that extended over a period of time. Romantic Quality was the present, the here and now of things. Classic Quality was always concerned with more than just the present. The relation of the present to the past and future was always considered. If you conceived the past and future to be all contained in the present, why, that was groovy, the present was what you lived for.

I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden--very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain--full of balsam and tang--I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully--I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one--it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake.

Now that the crisis had come she found herself able to confront it coolly - nay, more, to take a curious interest in it under all her secret fear and shame, as if some part of her had detached itself from the rest and was interestingly absorbing impressions and analyzing motives and describing settings.

Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal; but Gold and Silver will pass all the world over without any other recommendation than their own weight.

and all at once it seemed that past and present had joined again without any divisions in it, and that all my memories and impressions had ordered themselves into one complete pattern whose metaphor was always the shining city of the disinherited — a city now trying softly to spread the sticky prismatic wings of a new-born dragonfly on the night.

Frequently we imagine that we are behaving in a particular way because such behaviour accords with some abstract, lofty code of moral principles, when in reality all we are doing is obeying a deeply ingrained and long 'forgotten' set of purely imitative impressions.

I have seen many a face that was more good-looking — never one that looked half so good.

My impressions of contemporary France were mixed. I personally felt that it was quite provincial.