Guy Johnson Quotes

The man who raised me is black. Culturally, he made me who I am. He was a theatre director, so he also guided me artistically.

I'd studied theater growing up and loved that, but didn't have many examples of artists around me.

I was exposed to the arts, but there was no one in my family who was an artist.

I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things.

Ninety per cent of how you learn is watching great people. When you are surrounded by good actors it lifts your performance.

I was lucky. A lot of people have that. People that don't tell you what you want to hear, but what's best for you. I was blessed with great friends. I was always blessed that way. My dad always kept good people around me. I just got lucky. Because of the spotlight you're in, people are scared to tell you otherwise.

My older sisters were in acting, and of course, I wanted to be just like them!

The great thing about the Wilburys was that none of us had to take the heat by ourselves. I was just a member of the band. Nobody felt like he was above anybody else. We had such a good time.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

I learned from different guys I played with, too. The key was probably three people: The good Lord, the offensive linemen I played with and great fullbacks that could block very well.

If you ever have the good fortune to create a great advertising campaign, you will soon see another agency steal it. This is irritating, but don't let it worry you; nobody has ever built a brand by imitating somebody else's advertising.

While campaigning, I got to know many high-school teachers, and let me say that the good ones are the unsung heroes of our society, and the bad ones are the gravediggers.

You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.

It's a blessing because the Baldwin vibe on the street is what I live for the most. I think our name is something that a lot of people get a good feeling about and brings a smile to their face, and we're very fortunate.

I have my great grandmother's recipe for black beans, all the way from Cuba, and I know how to make those. I'm actually pretty good at it now. But my first time, the beans actually exploded in the pot, so I had black beans just dripping from the ceiling - which is actually a dream come true for most Cubans. It was a nightmare to clean.

My family was very supportive of whatever I wanted because my grandfather was an opera singer. My dad's dad. So my dad has an appreciation for the arts, and he let me choose my own path.

All that is noble in the world's past history, and especially the minds of the great and the good, are never lost.

I am an Obamacare agnostic - if it works, as I hope it will for the good of the nation, then it's a great thing. If it doesn't, then that is a disappointing thing, and we need to try something else.

It is only from the people I've had the good fortune to meet that I am learning the lessons to guide me. Baz Luhrmann, director of 'Moulin Rouge,' for example, has a childlike curiosity about the world. He doesn't pretend to know all the answers - quite the opposite, in fact. He asks loads of questions of everyone.

When you work for Bruckheimer, you don't get it any better. He's the ultimate producer. I've had the good fortune of working with some great producers over the years.

I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.

I think the great thing about religion is it's there to teach us the good path and that we're all equal, that we should be treated as such.

I had many teachers that were great, positive role models and taught me to be a good person and stand up and be a good man. A lot of the principals they taught me still affect how I act sometimes and it's 30 years later.

I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.

My main teachers were my father and my mother and my brother.