Liz Phair Quotes

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

It's very much like filmmaking always is-you're always asked to do something that you're not sure you know how to do. So you make an educated guess as to what you think will work and you hope between that and plan B, that you can end up with a product that's really good.

I've figured out what to do so far, but it's always the next thing you come to where the man with the bucket of ice cold water is waiting - whoosh! in your face. That's why you work with directors who know what to tell you to do.

I like the idea of finding parts that I know I can do but I don't totally understand them right away.

You never know where a breakthrough might occur, so please pursue various possibilities for potential research.

You have to think that the answer - and the right answer - for you and your organization might not be something that's been done before. And it's up to you to discover and work with your team to form and figure out how to do successfully.

FCA is a culture of leaders and employees that were born out of adversity and who operate without sheet music.

I don't have any particular recipe. It is the reason why doing research is challenging as well as attractive. It is like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck, you might find a way out.

Derek Jarman shared the responsibility for making the film. He didn't necessarily know what he wanted - he knew what he didn't want - but you had to keep coming up with stuff.

I can't add above 10, I can't draw a stick figure, and I'm tone deaf. So I had to be able to do something. I found that something was picking successful models.

When Peter Schneider first approached me about adapting 'Sister Act' for the stage, it wasn't a slam dunk to say yes.

I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was; which was, let's keep throwing a bunch of things at the wall, and see what sticks.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. I always wanted to pursue either music or comics, so when the opportunity came from comics publisher Fantagraphics for my brothers Jaime and Mario and I to make a comic book together, we jumped at the chance: "Let's just do it and see what happens." Really, we weren't sure where we were going to go with it. We thought our work was good enough to be out there, but we didn't know that the response was going to be pretty good, pretty quick.

In the film industry you never really know if all the various ingredients will come together - sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. As an actor, you don't have much control over those things. It's a director's medium in that sense. All you can really do is minimise the risks of being involved in something that might not work and look for something that also suits you.

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about.

I like taking parts where I'm like: "I don't know how I'm going to do this exactly but I know I can do it." As opposed to doing something where you go: "There's nothing that I can contribute to this."

I have to admit, at first, it was really overwhelming and I would get stressed about putting things together. Now, it's like trying to figure out a puzzle piece, and I love that...There are so many things that I don't even know and would love to discover more about. I was so upset I had to leave [Europe] before Paris Fashion Week, but then I was like..."Oh wait, my album is coming out."

You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

As an actor, you want to remain vulnerable. You don't want to always have all the answers and you want to be fine doing things in the moment with your fellow actors.

All the problems sitting there are an invitation for you to be creative, make use of your skills and resources and find a solution.

You are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what's going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say 'yes.' And if you're lucky, you'll find people who will say 'yes' back.

The single best way to develop leaders . . . is to take people out of their safe environment and away from the people they know, and throw them into a new arena they know little about. Way over their head, preferably. In fact, the more demanding their challenges, the more pressure and risk they face, the more likely a dynamic leader will emerge.

I can picture certain things in my mind, while writing the script, but then I can also tell that everyone else might be a little confused about what it's supposed to look like at the end of the day. But it all works out. I find a way.

There were obvious budgetary and time constraint differences. With Jamie Marks is Dead, we were operating on a pretty small finance level. So it was definitely run-and-gun, 16-hour days, every day. I would come back, and I was so exhausted I would fall asleep in my clothes. Obviously, with The Giver we had a little bit more time to take the full three months. So that was different, but in both there was still a creative environment, and by that I mean that it was still collaborative, performance was still valued, and it wasn't lost in the money.

I loved the idea that I could write a joke and someone else would have to take the risk of performing it.