Quotes About Influence

I don't know if I would have had the same career had I not done 'GoodFellas.' Probably not. Would I have been cast on 'The Sopranos?' Who knows if there would have been a 'Sopranos?'

Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music - even The Who now cite him as an influence. There's an intense, dirty harmony, but there's a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.

Presumptuously, I speak for all Who fans when I say being a fan of the Who has incalculably enriched my life. What disturbs me about the Who is the way they smashed through every door of rock & roll, leaving rubble and not much else for the rest of us to lay claim to.

People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.

The band that changed my life was The Who. It's hard to pick just one album, but if I had to pick the one that really showed me how things could be done, it's 'The Who Sell Out.' They really went to town on that, doing something that no one had ever done before.

I grew up listening to classic rock - the Kinks, Genesis, The Who, Pink Floyd.

The Who is one of my favorite bands of all time. 'The Who Sell Out' is one of the greatest art-project albums of all time.

It's like this - these five members have been influenced of course by other groups, because that's where this generation's groups came from - an environment like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and The Who. People like that.

You see people who are 19 or 20 years old and they don't even know who The Who is. It's like, where have you been? Justin Timberlake? C'mon. Where are the roots?

C'mon, I mean who didn't listen to 'The Who' in the 60s?

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.

As a kid, I wasn't listening to The Who; I was listening to Frankie Knuckles.

There is never going to be a band like The Who again.

Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

Wouldn't it be grand if we thought that theater could have that impact on the political life of a country?

I came up around people who took acting seriously, who cared about acting, cared about the theater and, in the '70s, made movies that said something that mattered. I came up with those people, and I was a kid. Their ethos and credo became mine.

My mother is an actress, and she used to drag me from theater to theater and reading to reading.

You weren't going to the theater to change the world, but you had a chance to affect the world, the thinking and the feelings of the world.

I see a lot of art; we see a lot of music, films at Sundance... that influences me and informs me more than theater just because I make a bigger effort to see other art forms.

Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.

Growing up, my best friend was the movie theaters. I'd go to the movies every week, multiple times a week, with my dad or alone.

If you have a smartphone, you can give content to the world. The days of putting a movie in movie theaters because people don't have a choice is over.

I really look up to actors like Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett who have a strong background in theatre.

The man who raised me is black. Culturally, he made me who I am. He was a theatre director, so he also guided me artistically.