Quotes About Influence

Starting in 2005, my first session in the legislature, my colleagues elected me to be Democratic whip.

I can play the trumpet. Before I became an actor, I wanted to be the next Louis Armstrong. I started young and got to grade seven. When I turned 13, everyone started whipping out guitars, looking cool and joining rock bands, so I stopped playing.

Americans are big boys. You can talk them into almost anything. Just sit with them for half an hour over a bottle of whiskey and be a nice guy.

Because whisper networks are built on personal credibility and social capital, they often end up operating like exclusive clubs.

Sometimes I walk down the street and hear people whisper 'that's Tricky' and I look back, and I see them looking back, then that affects everything I do - the way I walk the way I talk. It stops you being real.

To me, Stephen Miller is like Iago whispering in the president's ear, along with John Kelly. These people are totally anti-immigrant.

I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it.

How can the country that created electricity, the light bulb, modern cinema as we know it, and the Oscar Meyer Weenie Whistle not be purely awesome?

I have three tools at my disposal - my whistle, my body language and my talk. It is a question of how I marry them up to try to get the players around to my way of thinking.

I was straight listening to rap at 15: LL Cool J, the Skinny Boys, Whistle, UTFO. And Run-D.M.C.'s debut was at the top of my list.

If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.

I feel like my style's always been influenced by 'less is more.' The coolest styles are kind of simple and classic, like a white T-shirt and jeans. Maybe you have a cool belt and cool shoes, but everything else you keep simple.

Shakespeare - I was very influenced - still am - by Shakespeare. I couldn't believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

And the White Album is important to me for different reasons. One - I had left the band on the White Album.

I followed the footsteps of Scarface, Willie D, Bushwick Bill, Big Pokey, Lil Keke, Fat Pat, Big Moe, and Slim Thug. Those are the people who I was following behind, not the white rappers who came before me. No disrespect intended, I just didn't follow that lane, I followed this one.

That's where the Black Keys and Jack White have succeeded and I've failed: They've actually convinced college kids that they're listening to hip music - but it's just blues twisted a new way - while I'm playing for the college kid's parents.

You didn't have to read 'Playboy,' visit the mansion, wear pajamas, or even be straight: The effects of its ideas about women on the American psyche were totalizing. Women were inferior to men because, for 'Playboy,' they were scenery - pretty, passive, usually white, often blonde, there.

You didn't know whether Chuck Berry was black or white - it was not a concern.

I really do believe that was what I was put on this planet to do: to give to people and, through my performances, show them another world - in the case of '24,' to show them what a politician, black or white, should be. Basically, I wanted to be a service to others.

I have to give credit to my mum for my music taste. She's white and Welsh but she listens to dancehall, reggae, Reggaeton.'

People of African descent, most of us grew up accepting and loving Spider-Man. I still love Spider-Man. I still love the Incredible Hulk. I still have those characters that were white role models, superheroes, heroes - whatever you want to call it. You basically had no choice but to accept those.

The mistake British comedians often make is trying to beat the Americans at their own game - getting visiting American singers on their shows, talking about 'sidewalk' instead of 'pavement,' sitting on high stools in a white dinner jacket doing ballads. That way, you simply end up with a mid-Atlantic mishmash.

I had that upbringing. Of watching 'Bonanza,' watching 'Hee Haw,' which both black and white would watch. I rode horses. I did gun spinning as a kid. I do these things.

I was raised in a mostly white neighborhood. I was this little white girl jamming out to Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby Brown.