Quotes About Autonomy

We should at least make sure that patients are given the opportunity to opt out of spending their final days in a hospital, hooked up to tubes and running up enormous bills.

The end of life is likely to be an important focus for innovation. Most people die in hospitals, tied up with tubes and with their bodies pumped full of drugs. Yet most would rather die at home and with more control over the timing and manner of their death.

I am a lot happier, focusing on the production side of things than wanting to be in front of the camera. If I am going to dance to someone else's tune, it might as well be my own.

I have a lot of dignity and am my own woman who does not dance to anyone's tunes.

There's only one cook in the kitchen, only one chef. I let the soloists do their thing - you've gotta let a man do a solo the way he wants - but as far as picking the tunes and working on the arrangements, I take full responsibility for it.

I can't imagine something worse than scripts being written into a tunnel, thinking, 'I don't know when this ends. I don't know.' It usually ends when people get sick of it, but I think it's great when it gets to end on its own terms.

So I've learned in the past, if a company approaches me and they want something like this, or something like that that I've done and I turn them down, they're going to do it anyhow.

I need someone who is able to hold her own - if a girl is really independent, that's a turn-on for me.

Cuba ought to be free and independent, and the government should be turned over to the Cuban people.

I've never turned to anybody for advice and counsel. Even when I was a very small child, I had to stand on my feet because of the circumstances of those times, and somehow, the circumstances have remained more or less the same. I have to take my own decisions.

Turner Broadcasting went from a very entrepreneurial, risk-taking company where I had a tremendous amount of freedom and autonomy to a corporate, bureaucratic nightmare.

It's too simplistic to advance the notion of the autonomy of art as a reason for turning away from the public. You can have autonomy and simultaneously have connections with the social and political world.

It's not that I don't respect my parents' authority or appreciate all that they did for me, but when I was 18 I was able to move out, and I was out. I feel like a different person since then; I mean, it's obviously a big turning point in life. I feel like I've established myself, and I'm a smarter and more mature for it.

It turns out I'm not very good at working with a traditional boss.

I prefer drawing the things I've written to handing them off to another artist. Turns out I'm a huge control freak - and because I write in thumbnails, the art is already happening by the time I start writing!

What people have thought of me, of the turns that I've taken, has never really played into my decisions.

One of the nice things about not working on a TV show anymore is that I'm not on any particular kind of clock.

I can't do anything I want to. I mean, I can't have my own TV show. I can't have my own movie. But within my little world, nobody tells me what to put on the albums.

Doing a musical is like having a kid. It's out there alive somewhere. It's not like a movie or a TV show where what we intended is what everyone will see. The kid can act out. The kid's going to do what it wants to do.

I realized I don't want anyone to control my destiny, whether it's a network TV show or not. I would rather invest in my own projects and if they fail, they fail on their own merits, not because somebody else mangled it.

The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.

The best part about stand-up is that you control everything. Period. When you work in movies, or on TV shows, there are 50 other people involved.

Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.

I distanced myself, relatively, from my parents for a year or so in my late twenties. It was necessary for me to feel my autonomy. Other than that brief gap, we have always been a very close family.