Doug Stanhope Quotes

I've realised that when I don't play people who are complex I get very, very bored, and then lazy, and end up being rubbish.

I suppose what I like about Zen is that the teachers are constantly questioning your insight and challenging it, looking for sloppiness or laziness in it, and ways you can go past that.

It's gut instinct that helps me determine how to write a story. I love the surreal because I am faced with the challenge of making the unbelievable believable. That challenge is thrilling.

Not everybody can do the comic book adaptation thing and make it believable. It is challenging.

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

For me it's the challenge -- the challenge to try to beat myself or do better than I did in the past. I try to keep in mind not what I have accomplished but what I have to try to accomplish in the future.

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

Just movies in general. It's such a wonderful business as much as you feel, you are fine tuning your craft, every movie is a completely different challenge. Every fight sequence is different. Every action set piece. I enjoy that.

You're always looking for some new way to tell the same story, but it's how they get to the happy end that is the challenge and the fun for a writer.

Human relations tend to be more difficult when you're dealing with someone who weighs 30 kilograms more than you do. That's when you worry about whether a well-meaning gesture could produce complications. We have no problems with countries like Madagascar or Bolivia, for example. But Germany is our neighbor and we have a shared past. Besides, Germany is powerful and ambitious and more than four times as large as we are. It makes complete sense that we would act cautiously. It's simply Realpolitik.

I've always seen myself as a small entity, and it will always stay like that. I'm not changing. But I think the big challenge for me taking on the Dior thing is to see how I can connect that to such a huge institution.

My love is for acting not money, so I only take on roles that I find challenging, in stories I find interesting.

I'd like to be a weak, boring housewife. Because then it would involve more acting. It would be challenging to do something like that.

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia.

It's a lot of work to put a brand-new monologue and a brand-new show on the air and find comedy every single day. It's challenging and it's the hardest thing I have ever done, but it's the best-suited thing for me. The more relaxed I get and the more confident I feel, the more I get to play and be myself...

When a new project comes along, I want to know that the experience is going to be challenging and exciting. Part of me is going to be drawn to doing something new and also the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity.

I really like the challenge of working with different kinds of music. I feel like my role is really like a coach, so I feel like I can do my job for different kinds of music that may not necessarily be what I listen to.

It takes more to make one sage today than it did to make the seven of Greece. And you need more resources to deal with a single person these days than with an entire nation in times past.

In opposing we always talk about freedom in the Western world, Muslims always talk about justice. Very often we mean the same thing. But what we do mean, what in the Western world we call human rights, in the Islamic world, they don't talk about rights. Now they do, but in the past they didn't. It wasn't part of their terminology. But really it's the same thing.

A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

I've never really had a favorite player, past or present.

As time goes on we become old, the future contracts, the past expands...But by future we don't just mean the years ahead; we always mean as well the plenitude of possibilities which challenge our creativity...In confrontation with the future we can become young if we accept the future's challenges.

Every book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.

If I'm not like my characters, I think just it's like a musician liking to play certain pieces of music rather than others. I just have more satisfaction when playing complicated things rather than some of your more straightforward, simple moments. . . . I like to be challenged.