Quotes About Influence

Marlon Brando changed everything for actors. After him, everyone wanted to be Marlon. No one wanted to be a type: they all wanted to display versatility in every role.

People don't realize this, but throughout my career, I grew up patterning my game after Scottie Pippen's. I admire him for his versatility.

'Gorilla Man' is a composite of a few individuals, but the song itself was actually inspired by James Taylor. I spied his 'Gorilla' album laying on my floor and in some altered state, instantly started singing the chorus. It was fun to write. There's an old notebook with at least three more verses in it somewhere.

There was a lot of other people that had their own song or their name in a verse in high school. I was just like, 'To stamp my high school career, I gotta get my name in a song.'

At this point, in 2008, if you put out a book, a movie, or write a verse, paint a painting, it should have some sort of social value.

When I went to college, I made my first mixtape, and Sean gave me three verses for it. That was a big reason anyone ever listened to my music. I definitely wouldn't be talking to you now if it wasn't for Big Sean.

I feel that, every day, God molds me into someone that He wants me to be. So if that means just, like, talking to teammates and helping them out, or, like, every so often I'll post a Bible verse on Twitter or Instagram.

To have Run-DMC acknowledge you, something like that, you're like, 'Oh, I'm that dude.' To have Jay-Z do a verse, you that dude. To have Jay-Z shout you out in an intro, you're that dude. Like, it doesn't get any greater than that. Nobody can take that from you.

The original version of 'Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang' was made to a Boz Scaggs song; I can't remember the name of the song.

Mike Mignola's 'Hellboy' was influenced by Lovecraft big time. He wanted to make his monsters Lovecraftian. But I think many other films have been influenced by Lovecraft - like 'Alien,' which is almost an outer-space version of 'At The Mountains Of Madness.'

I never understood why movies don't have to be as responsible, or the responsibility stops with Rated R. I feel like music, you gotta - you put the sticker on it, you make the clean version, then you're explaining yourself, and then you have to do charities to offset what you just said. No one else has to do this!

American television constantly tries to co-op British comedy and create their own version of it. Most of the time it doesn't work; obviously, in the case of 'The Office,' it did. But a lot of times, it doesn't really work.

I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version.

I was an enormous fan of Dan Slott's run, and John Byrne's run was a big deal for me. I found Slott's version of 'She-Hulk' first, and then I went back and looked up some of the older stuff because I liked it so much. And it was so good. It was perfect. It was my perfect comic book at the time that I found it.

My version of a good role model is everything that I have strived to become over the years, as I have a deep desire to live an honest life and give relentlessly and openly to people who look up to me.

I think it's a very dangerous game to play when you assume that just because someone's an entertainer, they're automatically a role model. Entertainers are there to entertain. They aren't there to teach your children the lessons that you haven't bothered to teach them at home yourself. They're just doing their own version of entertaining.

Some characters think more like me than others; some think more like my dad or someone else. It certainly is made up of my experiences, things I've heard, things I think are funny, things I think are sad. There's sort of a strange, blurry version of yourself in there.

My focus isn't Hollywood; my focus is using Hollywood as an example. Because what happens here does happen everywhere. It's just a really concentrated and tense version here.

The challenging part of parenting for me is to make sure that an individual person is an individual and not some sort of cookie-cutter version of me. At the same time, I want to make sure that I impart my sense of the world as an adult.

Tully was the first young, handsome, cocky, well-dressed bad guy. He was our version of Ric Flair before I knew who Ric Flair was. This was before cable TV or any of that, and Tully was our Ric Flair.

Your circumstances can have an effect on you as a person. If you are nurtured and looked after by the right people, you can be the best version of yourself.

When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.

I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant.

According to the scientific naturalist version of cosmic history, nature is a permanently closed system of material effects that can never be influenced by something from outside - like God, for example.