John Battelle Quotes

I did theatre all my life and then went into the film world. I then kind of segued into TV land, which is a different experience.

Today's merger makers are not ad people; they're building communications companies.

I think so often you can come out of drama school and get thrown in the deep end.

Everyone I know who used to be in the intelligence community is moving into the corporate world.

Meanwhile, what about the workers in those state monopolies that are being put up for sale? I am reminded of a technique for employee ownership that has worked well for many U.S. companies. It goes by various names, but the best known is "Employee Stock Ownership Program," or ESOP.

People always ask about the transition from TV show to a movie, but it felt like just going to a different school. You don't really notice the transition, when you're in the moment.

I have made many memories during my time with Chelsea, which I will take with me into my next challenge.

Nothing can really prepare you for live TV because you never know what's going to happen. I think, for me, what really helps is I know what I'm looking for when I'm shooting things, so it definitely helps to have that eye and know what camera you're looking at.

Going to Charlotte and being there two years, I missed L.A., but it was good for me.

I experienced a lot of things while I was working with Dibakar Banerjee.

A lot's been said about me playing for three different managers.

I don't think that Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO (leveraged buyout) business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal. That, you know they got out of long before it got to its current size.

No other technology company other than Apple has successfully transitioned their platform. It's almost never done, and it's way harder than you realise. This transition is where tech companies go to die.

The sense of endings as well as beginnings in the air is now so obvious in so many dimensions of our experience that a critical mass has been reached.

The most important thing for me is the moment, going from one thing to the next and hitting all the different levels and different points that make the whole what it is.

We're not about liquidating companies, but if you do that, why is that terrible? We're not blowing up the factories. The person who buys it should be able to make the asset more productive.

Sure enough, as merger has followed merger, journalism has been driven further down the hierarchy of values in the huge conglomerates that dominate what we see, read and hear. And to feed the profit margins journalism has been directed to other priorities than "the news we need to know to keep our freedoms"

A lot of military kids make a lot of moves but I only made the one, so it wasn't really an issue for me.

Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else.

All across America news organizations have been devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions.

All of the younger actors keep coming up to me and asking me where all of the land mines are because they know I've stepped on them all.

I really wanted to do a comedy. I've done a lot of drama, and comedy was the one genre I was not being offered. So I became obsessive about getting one. I tried with two little parts in comedies that were more mainstream, I was kind of fumbling around, and then I read The Brothers Bloom and knew it was the one I wanted to jump into. Did it take adjusting? Actually, it's not really any different from doing drama.

With all the mass media concentrated in a few hands, the ancient faith in the competition of ideas in the free market seems like a hollow echo of a much simpler day.

I feel I can still do the same job as I did 10 years ago - I've just got a few more wrinkles!

I used to think that seniority was a terrible thing when I didn't have any.