Choice words: a year of celebrity quotations
Another year of Big Interviews, another year of provocative quotations from some of the most fascinating celebrities around today. Here are my favourites.
Madonna “Sure, I like to provoke to get a reaction, but there’s always a reason behind it. There’s always some minds that need to get opened, some ears that need to listen, some ideals that need to change.” James Franco “When I relieve myself of that pressure to be ‘James Franco, the act-uh’ then I can have fun with my public persona. I can mock myself. People may laugh at me for that, but I’m the one who’s laughing loudest.” Amy Poehler “Success is like MSG. Once you start swallowing it, you’re never quite full. You reach the top of a mountain and you say, ‘Aha, so this is where I’ve always wanted to be and I am happy.’ And that lasts about, oh, two weeks.” Michael C. Hall “Doing the kill scenes was actually the least stressful part of playing Dexter, in a way. Those were the scenes when I could just be who he was. I would endow the person I was killing with some aspect of myself that I would like to do away with.” Céline Dion “If you can find energy in a rock that your children gave you, that can become the most precious thing in your life. If you don’t believe in something, then you’re a little bit dead.” Norman Reedus “I was doing art shows before I started ( The Walking Dead). I did an eight-foot-high lifelike sculpture of me out of blue polyurethane foam. I looked like Mr. Freeze. I put it inside a plastic case and then I filled it with rats.” Seth Meyers “I was never the kind of guy in the front of the class telling jokes. I was in the back of the room making wry comments. I was never inflating my own balloon. I was more interested in deflating others.” Joan Rivers “Every joke I make, no matter how tasteless, is there to draw attention to something I really care about. And if the jokes I make call attention to things that aren’t right in the world, that’s why I do it.” Ryan Reynolds “No matter what you’ve been doing, no matter what you think you might have accomplished, you still always feel like that kid who’s sitting on the bench. You catch the coach’s eye and you wonder, ‘Is he looking at me?’ and yeah he is. All of a sudden he points at you and you’re in the game.” Miss Piggy “I did have to do some less-than- stellar gigs along the way. There was glove modelling, perfume spraying and one rather unfortunate ad for pork products. But one puts such memories behind one and makes sure they’re very well buried.” Mike Tyson “Religion is for people who are scared of hell. I’m spiritual because I’ve already been to hell.” Jose Feliciano “God did not want me to be a blind beggar on the street, alone and bitter. He gave me music, first to be my companion and then to be my salvation.” David Cronenberg “Why do I concern myself so much with sex and death? It’s simple. Sex is the only way we have of keeping death at bay.” Camille Paglia “Feminism today just exists as a bunch of mean girls on Twitter.” Stephen Sondheim “You hang around long enough, you become an institution . . . just like a goddamn bank.” Carly Rae Jepsen “Every day I’d wonder if (my life) was ever going to turn into anything. I realize that those are struggles everybody goes through. The only difference is if you give up or not.” Elvis Stojko “It doesn’t do you any good to say I should have done this or I should have done that. If you always win, you never really learn. People don’t realize it’s not about having a perfect life. It’s about having the best life you can.” Andrea Martin “We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Wandering through the wilderness for years, saying, ‘What am I doing? Why am I in this business, anyway?’ And then, all of a sudden, it just works out.” Molly Ringwald “Everybody always says they want to make a huge hit John Hughes movie like ( The Breakfast Club), but the problem is that none of them are John Hughes.” Yann Martel “Artists risk it all and sometimes they get nothing in return, and wind up being bitter and aging, and teaching creative writing.” Fran Drescher “Cancer is a membership to a club nobody wanted to join. But when you get to the other side, your life has changed for the better. Sometimes the best gifts come in the ugliest packages.” Bill Maher “I still try to find the humour in things, but I try to find the truth first. If the truth leads to humour, great. If it doesn’t, tough. But it’s better to go with the truth.” Isabella Rossellini “I would like to be a man, yes, I would. Maybe just one day. Why? To see what it felt like. Not just the physical, but the emotional. Is it different to be a man? Or are we all truly just the same inside?” Jonathan Groff “I remember looking at a giant billboard for Will & Grace when I was in eighth grade and being relieved that there were gay characters on TV and I wasn’t alone.” Melissa Etheridge “On my 17th birthday, I kissed a girl. And apologies to Katy Perry, I didn’t just like it — I loved it. I didn’t even have to think it was right, because I felt it was.” Josh Groban “Being a solo artist means you travel a solo path. Every time you come home, you have to renew your relationships with your family, your friends, your dog.” Hilary Mantel “I’m not very conscious of having to mine my own past or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t do it unconsciously. I think of it as putting the bucket down into the well and wondering how deep and dark I’m going to go this time, what horrible things will come up.” Peter Sellars “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I disagree with that last word. If you’ve killed a lot of people and you don’t feel good about it, that’s a sign of order to me. That’s the correct human response. The sign of your humanity is that you can’t get over what you just did.” Tom Stoppard “Something you might chance to read in the paper that morning can change the direction in which the play you’re writing is going. It’s like eating sushi in one of those little restaurants with a train going by. You just take what goes by at the moment and looks appealing.” Juliette Binoche “You know, sometimes I think there is really no such thing as pure freedom. Life makes decisions for you. There is a sort of freedom given to you, yes, but there are also always plans. It’s like a plane going through clouds. We’re not the clouds, but they can determine the way we fly.” Jeffrey Tambor “What I loved about ( Arrested Development) was that you never knew what was going to happen next, and I worship ‘I don’t know’ over ‘I know.’ ” James Ellroy “What do I like? I like women, I like cars, I like America, I like a good movie, I like a good hamburger.” Charles Aznavour “Every song is in the air. You just have to know where to pick it up. I learned to listen very carefully to people from the very start.” Andrew Lincoln “(On The Walking Dead), we have to develop our own mortality, create our own new Ten Commandments. We’ve been forced to face the animal inside of us and now that we have, we keep asking, ‘Do I deny this part of my being? Do I deny my brutality?’ ” Shaun Majumder “Calling me a Paki is lazy racism. I wanted to say to (hecklers), ‘Actually my father is from India and they separated from Pakistan in 1947, so learn your f---ing history, man.’ ” Anne Rice “I finally came to the conclusion that no one can write the scripts for our lives. Loving God was one thing. Loving Jesus was another thing. But the Catholic belief system was something that ultimately I had no belief in.” Alan Cumming “You know, people always like to say, ‘You signed on for it when you decided to become famous.’ Well I didn’t sign on for it. I didn’t decide to become famous. I decided to become an actor and the rest just happened.”