Ry Cooder Quotes

There's definitely a lot of undiscovered talent in Africa. If I'm one of them and there's a few other guys in the league, that means that there must be some that are hidden.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

There's talent on the streets, kids with ideas who have stories to tell and never get a chance.

The best live among us in disguise.

I'm sure there are talented Arab fighters out there waiting to be discovered.

Here's the fascinating part, call it the golden shoulder: We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there's a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don't know who they are.

I think there's an enormous lot of talent around, and somewhere amongst these I'm sure that something will emerge, given time.

I think the problem for the future generations is a lot of people ain't takin' the time to look for them and give them their voice, so therefore for their voice to be heard, they gotta bang more pots on the ceiling, so to speak; they gotta do crazy things just to get recognized. I just feel that whenever you don't give a generation some kind of voice, then expect side effects.

I think making movie is kind of like getting fat people to walk 20 miles. If you just do it 100 yards at a time, and nobody knows how far they are going, they can do it!I would include myself in those fat people! You do this little by little and you don't realize your potential, or you don't realize how really rich, and how far you can go.

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.

I am always looking for what I think are original voices.

Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.

Best of an island is once you get there - you can't go any farther...you've come to the end of things.

I don't think somebody can just, like, wave a magic wand and make you a star.

Observe and contemplate on the hidden things of life: how a man's seed is but the beginning, it takes others to bring it to fruition. Think how food undergoes such changes to produce health and strength. See the power of these hidden things which, like the wind cannot been seen, but its effects can be.

I think there's a part of all of us that wonders how we would survive on an island untouched by Man. Even better, an island untouched by Man and inhabited by King Kong.

We're all intrigued, in our civilized world that we live in, and curious about how we would get on, on an undiscovered island that is untouched by man.

When you have a special gift you don’t realize it because you think everyone else has the same gift.

It's frustrating in the sense that I still think I could be competing at some sport at a fairly high level, which nobody cares about. Nobody wants to hear me say that.

When you look into the faces of these quiet creatures who don't know how to tell stories--who are mute, who can't make themselves heard, who fade into the woodwork, who only think of the perfect answer after the fact, after they're back at home, who can never think of a story that anyone else will find interesting--is there not more depth and more meaning in them? You can see every letter of every untold story swimming on their faces, and all the signs of silence, dejection, and even defeat. You can even imagine your own face in those faces, can't you?

It would be wrong to interpret the growth of British national consciousness in this period in terms of a new cultural and political uniformity being resolutely imposed on the peripheries of the island by its centre. For many poorer and less literate Britons, Scotland, Wales and England remained more potent rallying calls than Great Britain, except in times of danger from abroad. And even among the politically educated, it was common to think in terms of dual nationalities, not a single national identity.

There's a small island, inhabited in the South Pacific that I will try to swim to.

In the bare room under the old library on the hill in the town at the tip of the small peninsula on the cold island so far from everything else, I lived among strangers and birds.

Lee Strasberg told me I had talent. Real talent. It was the first time that anyone, except my father--who had to say so--told me I was good. At anything. It was a turning point in my life. I went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting. It was like the roof had come off my life!