Quotes About Influence

All the kids at the kindergarten had to play, or at least touch, the piano. It was a good start. Then, after kindergarten, all my friends took piano lessons, so I joined them.

Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

Picasso's always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.

I have seen Colonial churches since I was very small, Colonial painting and polychrome sculpture. And that was all I saw. There was not a single modern painting in any museum, not a Picasso, not a Braque, not a Chagall. The museums had Colombian painters from the eighteenth century and, of course, I saw Pre-Columbian art. That was my exposure.

'Matisse and Picasso' is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn't write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn't write about them.

I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.

Like Picasso, I go through blue periods, green periods, or grey periods.

My first influence obviously was Picasso.

It took me six years to get close to Picasso. I learnt a lot from him, and he was an absolute genius. He almost became my grandfather at the time. It was like he was a magician or something.

A guy is a lump like a doughnut. So, first you gotta get rid of all the stuff his mom did to him. And then you gotta get rid of all that macho crap that they pick up from beer commercials. And then there's my personal favorite, the male ego.

When people say, 'I don't see you enough,' well just because you don't see me don't mean I don't exist, or just 'cause you haven't heard me don't mean I haven't been making noise. But if I keep making noise, you'll pick up.

When I started out in the early 1970s French cooking was really my only serious influence. For the first 10 years of having the seafood restaurant open I went to France, and particularly Brittany, to pick up ideas.

Legislation won't necessarily start a riot. But the right song can make someone pick up a chair.

You are bound to pick up influences.

Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.

If I had to pick a favorite band of all time, it would be Rush.

If I had to name one book that has had the most lasting influence on my work, I would pick 'The Big Sea' by Langston Hughes.

You try to pick good stories, and that's pretty much all the control you have as an actor.

I just aspire to pick people up. That's my ambition.

You see people on TV flying in to places just to pick up a baby, or brush some flies away. That's great if they can bring that issue to public attention. But that's not what I wanted to do. I was interested in committing to something that I could function in whether I was Debra Winger or not. Because nobody might care about that next week.

But KISS inspired me personally to pick up a guitar and go for it.

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It's just great to let other people carry the narrative.

A leader can't pick and choose when he wants to lead.