Quotes About Inspiration

People ask what my influences are, and for me, it's not always obvious. One of my biggest inspirations was Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders. That's based on how she just does whatever she wants to do, and I love her attitude about everything. It bleeds over into my way of thinking and comedy.

It has been a pleasure to play with all these artists. Pretenders was a real highlight, but also Damon, aka Badly Drawn Boy, Sinead... Ian Brown... all of these people I learn from and love to work with.

I don't think it is important to be a role model, because if you are a role model, you are pretending to be someone else.

I had no real idea I was going to become a writer. It was just a game for me. I just liked pretending, daydreaming and imagining.

As a kid, I was always pretending to score the goal in the FA Cup final, and I managed to live my dream.

There are artists in Belgium who try to imitate American artists. But it's like, if you're Belgian pretending to be American, you won't be better than the American because you aren't American. You have to do your own stuff.

When I was, like, 12, I remember grabbing a mic, pretending it was a guitar, and performing in front of my friends. I didn't know at the time I wanted to be an artist.

In Beijing when the Chinese athletes had a massive roar that gave me a buzz pretending they were shouting for me.

It sounds pretentious to say I 'divide' my time, but when I am home, that usually means my house in Atlanta or my cabin in the North Georgia Mountains. The latter is where I do the majority of my writing.

Honestly, I don't focus on what my writing is called. I don't mean to sound artsy and pretentious, I just really can't think of things in that way. For me, the point is telling a story that keeps people up past bedtime, while hopefully exploring ideas that resonate.

I want to paint. That is probably going to sound so pretentious coming from someone who's been a musician.

Early on, I said to myself that I would like to write a kind of moral and spiritual history of a place. It sounds a little pretentious, I know. But that's really what I set for myself.

I know it sounds really precious and pretentious, but I can't actually remember deciding to want to be an actor. I just knew that I had too many feelings and I had to kind of get them out in some way.

There's nothing prettier in the world than a melody. I can get lost in a song with a melody. A lot of times I have, and the song wasn't that good, but I would get lost in that melody, and I'd want to do the song.

When I was really little, I loved Whitney Houston. I thought she was the prettiest thing in the world.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

I know dock leaves pretty well, but I should not attempt to introduce them into a picture without having them before me.

If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.

It's amazing how powerful a piece of work can be and how it can influence people and change. It's pretty interesting.

I'm not only my films, but I'm pretty much my films.

Pretty much my dreams came true when I did a duet with Lea Michele.

Music is really important to me; Kurt Cobain is important to me. Hearing Nirvana was pretty life-changing.

I think it's great that you have inspirational female roles, that it's not just the pretty girl on the arm of a man.

I think we did a pretty good role, linking, being a sounding board really and a driving force, especially from the bottom up. I think that part of this is bottom up as well as top down.