Quotes About Influence

Jay-Z, for a lot of reasons, will always be my favorite. But actually, in terms of what I listen to, it bends towards hip-hop, but I like everything. The only thing I don't really love is country, but everything else I'm a huge fan of.

Everyone plays their own crucial part towards the film.

In the coming years, if not sooner, social media will become a powerful tool that consumers will aggressively use to influence business attitudes and force companies into greater social responsibility - and, I suggest, move us towards a more sustainable practice of capitalism.

I was obsessed with country music when I was a kid, and it's definitely had a huge influence on the way I write songs. I was always attracted to songs that had a brilliant pun or a clever turn of phrase, but came from a dark, bitter place. As a writer, I've always gravitated towards that feeling.

I have long since thrown in the towel on the Democratic and Republican parties because they are really a front group for the 1%, for predatory banks, fossil fuel giants, and war profiteers.

You have to understand, I grew up in the shadow of the Safeco tower.

I grew up in the GOP sandbox. My dad took me, age 7, to meet Herbert Hoover, in his apartment at the Waldorf Towers. He gave me a silver dollar. Being a young Republican, I spent it on comic books.

'Fawlty Towers' was a huge influence on me. I mean, it was so slapstick, too. 'Are You Being Served?' was on 15 times a day, it seemed like, and I loved it.

When I was in my late teens, I discovered 'Fawlty Towers' and 'Monty Python,' and they still make me laugh.

As for my all-time sporting hero? There is one who towers above all. I first knew him when he was called Cassius Clay but it was when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali that I became mesmerised by him.

Part of the reason people abroad resent the United States is something Americans can do very little about: envy. The richest, most powerful country in the world attracts the jealousy of others in much the same way that the richest, most powerful man in a small town attracts the jealousy of others.

I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.

She wanted us to feel we were above everyone in the town. She really did tell us that we were related to Chief Justice John Marshall, and that may have been true. I never did bother to find out.

I would be nothing if it wasn't for the town where I grew up and the people who gave me my inspiration.

The older I grow the more I see the influence of my family on my life. I didn't always see it. It was up to our parents to see that we had our education in a town that hadn't yet realized what racial prejudice was but actually knew and practiced it on occasion.

This town was built on nepotism.

I'm a Juventus fan, although I did support Chelsea for some time - mainly because of Gianfranco Zola. Zola is from the same town as my father Enzo, in Sardinia.

I've been a Leeds fan for as long as I can remember. When you are about five or six, you adopt a team - obviously, I didn't grow up in Leeds. I grew up in a small town on the Irish border, and most of the people my age were Leeds fans, both then and now.

I hope that somewhere in Small Town, U.S.A., a 15-year-old kid looks to me as a role model the way I looked at the Indigo Girls and Elton John as role models.

My grandmother was a big Elvis fan, and I am, too, because she played Elvis, and she would keep me all the time when my dad was out of town.

So many girls come up and say to me, 'I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn't even know my town had a country-music station. Then I got your record, and now I'm obsessed.' That's the coolest compliment to me.

Politics is still the No. 1 sport in town and the scoreboard shows the U.S. attorney's office leading.

You can be president of the United States and have the best, most bipartisan-seeming idea in the world. But if it doesn't have a constituency, you might as well be town clerk of Toad Suck, Arkansas.

The openness of rural Nebraska certainly influenced me. That openness, in a way, fosters the imagination. But growing up, Lincoln wasn't a small town. It was a college town. It had record stores and was a liberal place.