Ving Rhames Quotes

I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.

Songwriting I think, or any art form, the inspiration comes from your personal life or it can be from politics or region you live in.

There was very little art in my childhood.

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.

One of the reasons I never had a problem handing over my characters to other creators is that I knew that they would add their own influences and takes on the characters and make them better for it.

I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

You gotta live life before you can talk about it. Sometimes when things don't work out in life, they work out on stage.

Everything I see and hear... I will take ideas from anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and life has become a song to me. I'm always looking for a song.

Anybody who dedicates himself to exploring the human condition, there's always a detached eye that's watching. In any situation, a little part of me is observing it, to see if there are any raw materials to create something else later.

And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about.

I started in theater, and I love to go back to theater, just to have the experience and recharge my batteries, creatively.

I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.

The songs are inspired by my experiences. Sometimes they are more than my real-life and, conversely, my life is more than just my songs.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I wouldn't say that I'm very similar to the character of Nathan at all. Both of us have had very different upbringings and backgrounds. I have a competitive nature like the character of Nathan. That's really easy to draw from when I'm acting; that's probably the biggest similarity.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn't come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that's where the stimuli and influence comes from.

All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.

Your background and environment is with you for life. No question about that.

If I can't find real situations that interest me in real life, then I'll go and write them in play form.

I was never so directly inspired by fashion. It always came from somewhere else.

I think all our characters are an amalgam of people we know in our world and ourselves.

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.