Steven Soderbergh Quotes

Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors precisely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.

I started playing the bass because nobody else would play the bass, and then I got bumped up into singing because no one else really wanted to sing. So I learned how to sing and I wrote the songs, so I tended to get the most attention.

I know I can go out there and play much better than I did yesterday. But to come out with a win is key.

There was never any down side to casting friends over professionals. It was always fun seeing folks who never performed before stretching their wings.

No good play is a success; fine writing and high morals are useless on the stage. I have been scribbling twaddle for thirty-five years to suit the public taste, and I should know.

I can't possibly predict precisely what the unemployment rate will be at the end of one year. I can tell you that over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies that we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down to 6%, and perhaps a little lower.

I saw Waiting for Godot when I was 17 in rep with a then unknown actor called Peter O'Toole playing Vladimir. I remember leaving the theatre promising myself that one day I would have a go at this play and then pretty much forgot it for 50 years.

The only way I was allowed to play was by convincing bands to let me do a few songs while they set up. That went on for years.

Businesses and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get resolved.

I'd love to take a year off and travel the world under the radar. I would love to do it really low key. I wouldn't need to stay in fancy hotels or anything; I just want to explore - but I don't know how I'd do it. Would I shave my head to try and go incognito? Ha ha! I'm not telling.

So learning to play a new instrument, learning a new language - those sorts of things will pay dividends for years or decades to come.

No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can't be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush's style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don't, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing.

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner... I go to the piano, and I play preludes and fugues of Bach... It is a sort of benediction on the house.

What we have done over the last 40 or 50 years is systematically attacked and weakened the parties, the political machines, the professionals, and insiders, and hacks, and all the tools that they use to get politicians to play well together. And with those gone, you get chaos.

In the end, we are not the roles we play. We are the light that animates every soul in the dance we call life.

I could never have thought, "I wanna play a two-headed woman." That just never would have occurred to me, in a million years.

When you're 20 you can put a ton of old-age prosthetics on and be an old guy, but when you're 70 you can't play a 20-year-old.

The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.

All organizations start with WHY, but only the great ones keep their WHY clear year after year.

A hundred years ago-even 20 or 30 years ago-it was possible, if not always easy, to close major business by calling on and satisfying a key decision-maker. Today, every piece of business entails multiple decisions, and those decisions are virtually never made by the same person. Not only do you have to contend with multiple decisions, but the people who make those decisions may not even work in the same place.

Butler's interception comes off as a great play, which it really was, at the biggest time of the year.

It's really quite an interesting dynamic. I wanted to play to the truth of who Manute was in the first film, while it's also a prequel and the originator [of the story]. It was an interesting dynamic to work with, definitely. I haven't seen the film yet, but the way it felt when I was doing it, it felt like it worked.

I would never do a printed memoir. I've been asked to publish a memoir from years by different publishers and literary agents. I think it wouldn't be great for me because all I'd really want to talk about it music and I'd rather just play it.

I can only play characters that I feel like are real people and in a complete way and in such a whole way that if I fake any aspect of it I will have failed them and literally they're slaughtered.

Not every person has the same kinds of talents, so you discover what yours are and work with them.