I don't like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I'm from New York. I will kill to get what I need.
If you're born and raised a New Yorker, you're probably pretty to-the-point, and you don't care so much about hurting people's feelings as you do about saying what's on your mind, because you assume they'll get over it.
In this new place we've found, sometimes there aren't words, because the truth can be even more difficult than the lies.
I was a very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today I'd say, 'You're very talented and I'll try to help you, but I don't want anything else to do with you.
When I watched American Idol, I always thought Simon was the most realistic. Simon's like, It was absolutely horrid. That's what they tell in the music industry.
When I'm talking to an artist, I'm not being malicious when I tell them their music is wack. These are artists with mad money and fame so why should they care about my critique?
In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.
I never met Lou Reed, never was one of those journalists lucky enough to be the object of his derision, contempt, condescension, indifference, and occasional piercing honesty.
Read not books alone, but men, and amongst them chiefly thyself. If thou find anything questionable there, use the commentary of a severe friend, rather than the gloss of a sweet-lipped flatterer there is more profit in a distasteful truth than in deceitful sweetness.
It's the difference between someone who loves you more than anything in the world giving you criticism and getting it from some bitter stranger on the Internet. What my dad said to me was the kind of criticism where I was like, "Oh, my God, I'm on the wrong track." I'm so grateful to him for doing that. He was such a no-nonsense guy in that sense.
I think in a weird way that the entertainment industry is strangely more brutally honest than any other.
My family used to say, point-blank, 'We'd support you if we thought you could sing, or we thought you could write songs, but you can't.'
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.
There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
While my friend was my friend, he flattered me, and I never heard the truth from him. When he became my enemy, he shot it to me on a poisoned arrow.
There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.
