Quotes About Transformation

Never waste a crisis.

I was a magazine illustrator for many years before I became an actor, and I used to think, 'Oh, God, all those wasted years!' But now I think it's just been one big enterprise of illustrating. I used to do it with colored pencils, and now I do it with this voice and this set of limbs.

We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons, and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found.

I like to turn things upside down, to watch pictures and situations from another perspective.

It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.

It's frightening and unnerving to watch a stone melt.

I watch cooking change the cook, just as it transforms the food.

I've watched the world crash and burn in every sense. I've watched the record industry crash and burn; politically I've watched it crash and burn, financially crash and burn.

I watched a little girl cover her face up and leave her hands in front of her mouth. I saw that girl after surgery, and she was smiling... that's a great source of satisfaction.

Look at Greg Jbara! I've watched him work for years, always switching. He's literally a different human being when he's onstage in 'Billy Elliot.' That's the fun of what we do.

We were still quite religious until I was about eight or nine. Then I watched my parents take a dramatic turn and discard all religion.

From the first Lauren Luke tutorial I watched, I was completely taken with her.

Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Will Ferrell, those guys mean so much to me because I watched those guys and how they transform and watch the commitment to what they do. I admire them.

Rock bottom is a crisis... and everyone wants to avoid crisis. But what 'crisis' means literally is 'to sift' - like a child who goes to the beach, lifts up the sand, and watches all the sand fall away, hoping that there's treasure left over. That's what crisis does.

Who doesn't love a makeover? Even my husband watches 'What Not To Wear.'

One of my few childhood memories is as an eight-year-old, refused permission to watch the Hitchcock season on Irish television, sneakily viewing 'The Birds' though a crack in the living-room door. It transformed my hitherto perfectly enjoyable half-mile walk to school, down a country lane patrolled by watchful birds, into a terrifying ordeal.

There was this wonderful trick of going to the theater with my parents and sitting in the audience under the watchful eye of an usher, and then these other people would come on the stage: They spoke differently and had different clothes and hair. Afterward, they would come back, and they were my parents again. It was magic.

I can't believe it's been four years now, and from watching that pilot, we really all looked like babies. It's unbelievable just how far everything has come. I'm happier now than I've ever been on the show and in my life. I really owe so much of my happiness to 'Glee.'

I have a very specific memory of watching 'Singing in the Rain,' and looking at myself in the mirror after watching it and perceiving myself as one of those people that I was just watching on T.V. It was just kind of a knowing that this would be the world that I would enter into. And that's what I did.

Seeing, say, 'My Left Foot,' and 'The Last of the Mohicans.' How is that the same person? Or people like Johnny Depp, who can play Jack Sparrow and Edward Scissorhands. I am so interested in the transformation, in not knowing anything about them and watching somebody create a character. I'm not really interested in personalities.

Somebody like Bowie was so interesting because when you got him off stage, he was like a businessman. But on stage, he was just dazzling. It was like watching butterflies grow.

You know that moment in 'The Matrix' when Neo takes the red pill and is plunged into the real world? That's what it felt like when I first read 'Watchmen' - like someone was taking a can opener to my head to make room for Moore's audacious brilliance.

I think, before 'Watchmen,' I was the guy from 'Grey's Anatomy' who's a pretty good guy, a pretty charming sweet guy, and so as an actor, I really wanted to do something as far from that as I could.

Don't be a fish; be a frog. Swim in the water and jump when you hit ground.