Quotes About Influence

I grew up listening to Ravel, Debussy, Bartok and jazz like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhart. It was incredibly inspiring! And I was given a guitar and I said 'What the hell is this?!'

I don't really feel the pressure when people say, 'You're changing the game, you've gotta keep doing it.' I feel like I'm adding on. Lisa Leslie dunked, that inspired me to dunk. Candace Parker dunked.

I love kids that come to shows, little kids coming up to you with braces; like, some kid came up to me in a parking lot outside a show in Santa Cruz - he was about 14 or 15 - and he said, 'Y'know, I love 'The Basketball Diaries,' but I hope your next book of poetry isn't gonna be as academic as 'Living at the Movies' was.'

Rosa Parks is rock and roll.

It feels blessed to me. Because I go to comic cons, and people come up and they say, 'You're the reason I ride a motorcycle. You're the reason I became a mechanic.' And there are people who love 'Scream' and 'The Waterboy,' 'Royal Pains,' 'Parks & Rec,' 'Arrested Development.' And now 'Barry.' And then there are kids who only know me as an author.

The whole history of music has turned out to be something perfect. It's all come around. The music we did with Funkadelic and Parliament was the DNA for hip-hop.

An influential member of parliament has not only to pay much money to become such, and to give time and labour, he has also to sacrifice his mind too - at least all the characteristics part of it that which is original and most his own.

My parents were really into music. They would play the Funkadelics, Parliament, OutKast; they would just play that all around the house. They'd also play Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye, James Brown.

When I was 5, 'American Bandstand' had a lot of good artists on there, man. That's when I really started falling in love with the jams: Gladys Knight & the Pips, Patti LaBelle, Bootsy Collins, Parliament.

When I was a little bitty kid, I was listening to the stuff my parents were listening to. My mom was a huge Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige fan. My dad had a cover band that I sang with, and he loved Parliament, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton, the blues, James Brown.

I can't tell you how many times I've turned to Parliament Funkadelic for inspiration and actually just outright and replayed or sampled a song.

It is simply the view, and a view I think shared by most members of the party, that it is very difficult to have a leader that does not command the support of the parliamentary party.

You can't change the world through the parliamentary system.

I guess everything having to do with your background has some influence on how you tell stories but it's hard to parse how growing up in a Jewish community in Minnesota really affected it.

Me, myself, I was a part of gang bangin', you know what I'm sayin'?

Music is part of us, and either ennobles or degrades our behavior.

I shall participate, I shall contribute, and in so doing, I will be the gainer.

When people feel they're getting to speak into what's being preached, there is high built-in motivation to participate.

I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.

I've enjoyed being a baseball owner more because I've enjoyed owners being allowed to participate.

As leaders, our job is to engage people so that they will want to participate in this grand experience in self governance.

Twitter, it can be said, completely changed the way activism is done, who can participate, and even how we define it.

At a moment when people are losing faith in their ability to participate in politics and make themselves heard, the media can play a critical role in reversing that sense of alienation.

I wanted to write history rather than participate in it.