Quotes About Influence

I won't admit to having a poster of Borg on my bedroom door. But I certainly found him to be someone who got me way more into tennis.

I got a message from a little girl just saying that she's starting to play tennis because of me. That was pretty amazing.

When I was born, I lived with my dad for two years. I was always watching him on a tennis court as a kid, he was a fanatic. Boris Becker would come to the house and play chess.

Lars Ulrich is not a jazz drummer, but he grew up listening to jazz. Why? Because his father, Torben - an incredible tennis player - loved jazz. Jazz musicians used to stay at their house.

When I was very young, I started trying to sing like the great tenor Mario Lanza; my family used to play his records. We all learn best by imitating others.

Some people say there was no jazz tenor before me. All I know is I just had a way of playing and I didn't think in terms of any other instrument but the tenor.

My father was a jazz tenor sax player. He played in a lot of big bands. So I had that sound around me all the time. The first record that really caught my ear was Clifford Brown's 'Brownie Eyes.' I grew up listening to John Coltrane and Illinois Jacquet. This is where I come from... I love improvisational music.

When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.

Bud Johnson, God rest his soul of fame, a tenor saxophonist. Bud was always a big, big, big booster of mine and he always when I first met Bud in Pittsburgh when he came through there, he heard me sing and he wanted me to come to Chicago.

Books that do a tenth of what Left Behind has done are smashing successes.

I'm a tenured professor. But I'd get rid of tenure.

Everyone acknowledges that there is a political part to tenure, but no one likes to admit it.

The term 'the American Left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics. It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is.

I have been definitely influenced more by Latin American writers than by any other type of writer. They are very close in terms of voice - their humor, their fatalism, their... well, that over-used term 'magical realism.' It's a wonderful term that's just been used so much, we don't know what it means anymore.

When we buy somebody, we cut the head off. We keep the operators who are looking - I hate to use this term - they're looking for a leader. We lead very well. And we immediately spend money on them and make them better. Everybody wants to be led. Except for me. I want to lead.

'Conservative' is a term that resonates differently with people. For us, Tae and I take that as being modest. The easiest way to put it is, if there's a little girl in the audience, and she's looking at us, I want her parents to feel comfortable with her admiring us and looking up to us.

I still have five years to the end of my term. There are many candidates. There'll be a problem if it's supposed to be a European or someone from the emerging countries, the so-called BRICS. This will be decided, but please don't think Poland has anything to say about it.

When the term 'machine gun' enters common parlance, the word 'machine' becomes much more sinister.

As a lobbyist, I was completely against term limits, and I know a lot of people are against term limits, and I was one of the leaders, because why? As a lobbyist, once you buy a congressional office, you don't have to re-buy that office in six years, right?

That really makes you feel good when guys are using some of your terminology and some of your plays in a different country.

My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he's just started to understand that something's wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn't bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.

The dynamic of globalisation in financial and economic terms, but also in geopolitical terms, confronts Europeans with a stark choice: live together, share a common destiny and count in the world; or face the prospect of disunity and decline.

I have an older brother and sister, and I'm definitely ahead of my years in terms of sci-fi and films. My brother is a massive sci-fi fan, and the Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver era... I was involved and interested.

See, even despite pious statements to the contrary, much of the industrialized world has not yet come to terms with the recognition of the fallacy of what I call the strong man syndrome.