Quotes About Influence

My mother was the influence on me - my father was absent. He was a diamond dealer; he was doing wonderful things in the background, and women were left at home. So my mother really was in charge of everything: the ballet, dance lessons, piano lessons, and latkes.

I've learned from the greatest people, and I've got wonderful things to pass on.

Actors can be good, say all these beautiful, wonderful things - but where does it come from? It comes from the writers, and people kind of forget that sometimes.

I picked up some wonderful things just listening to other pianists that I appreciate, and that would be Herbie Hancock, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Horowitz, and Art Tatum. Those are the pianists I really enjoy and admire.

Paul Poiret did wonderful things because he was so influenced by motifs, but Vionnet really understood the kimono and took the geometric idea to construct her clothes - and that brought such freedom into European clothes in the 1920s.

You could be an 18-year-old girl in Tokyo wondering how you could ever break into fashion or beauty, so you follow your favourite designer or editor, see what their day comprises, where they go, who they meet, how they do it... If I were setting up my own label today, I would definitely do it through Instagram.

It's an epidemic. Instead of socialising and having proper conversations, we're staring at pictures of models in bikinis and wondering how they look like that. It's like self-loathing.

I think Romney's talking himself out of the election, to be honest. I was wondering what was gonna happen when the Republican power structure turned the money on, and then they turned on the money and nothing happened.

So much of our lives are defined by habit or what the guy next to us is doing, never wondering and knowing who and what we support with our actions, from the detergent Mom always used, to my favorite dish I make... A lot of my life is unexamined habit.

I started wondering why it is that people line up behind charismatic leaders. It's easy to understand the emergence of a figure who's narcissistic and compelling. But why people follow this person mindlessly - that was the hard question to me.

People would come up to me, saying, 'You sound a lot like the lead singer from Queen.' I started wondering, 'Who is this guy making me sound so unoriginal?'

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

I think a lot of people could do with buying a Flying Burrito Brothers record - it does wonders for you.

I grew up listening to Nirvana and then went through some bad '90s pop stuff - a lot of Australian one-hit wonders.

There are certainly stories that I used to tell myself as a kid that did influence 'The Cabinet of Wonders.' There's a scene in the novel where there's a flood that bursts through the castle, and one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid at school was imagine what school would be like if there was a sudden flood.

A-list stars go to Comic-Con to woo the nerd demographic.

Woo means the ability to entice someone or something to get what you want. My first solo album was called: All the Woo of the Universe, which was titled by George Clinton.

I think all the filmmakers in Hong Kong are influenced by John Woo.

I was always such an incredible fan of John Woo, I just wanted to do this film with him.

My mother and my great-aunt told me stories, like how when my grandfather first met my grandmother at a party, he noticed her long legs and was like, 'Woo woo!' I like to incorporate those stories into my music. They just seem to fit.

Bad company is like a nail driven into a post, which, after the first and second blow, may be drawn out with little difficulty; but being once driven up to the head, the pincers cannot take hold to draw it out, but which can only be done by the destruction of the wood.

The baddest woman in my book... my mother. I get scared of her now. She used to hit me with anything, skillets, stove wood.

I think 'Ballet Shoes' was a very pivotal role for me. I was about 14 then, and it was an incredible cast: Eileen Atkins, Victoria Wood, Emilia Fox, Harriet Walters. All these incredible women.

Every little girl wanted to be Natalie Wood, as did I.