A Quote by Edwin Moses

I used to be seriously incognito - without wanting to be. The effect of the magazines, television, billboards - they've changed my whole life in terms of having to deal with being a, quote, star.
We live in a society that worships youth. On television, in magazines, in advertisements and on billboards, what sells and what is sold to us is youth.
Without being overtly political about it, if people with severe disabilities are calculated in societal terms purely as a monetised unit, in terms of how much they cost in terms of care, you lose an important sense of who they are and the effect they have.
I'm used to being the only black guy. I've seriously walked onstage, looked out in the audience, 15,000 people - and I'm the only one in the place. It's no big deal. My whole career's been like that.
We're so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don't realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet... It's what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I'm saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored.
This is a weird feeling in my life I have to deal with, not being a violent man anymore when my whole life's reputation was built on being extremely violent. I just don't know how to deal with that right now. I don't even go to strip clubs no more. I don't know who I am sometimes, but I am not the guy I used to be. I'm not an angel or anything. I'm still lascivious, periodically. I'm just looking for some balance in my life.
How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? Television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable.
The way that I feel about my Jewish identity has been really radically changed by events in life. Like, becoming a writer is one. Having children is another. And getting older and watching, you know, my parents and grandparents get older has been another, the seasons of - being witness to the seasons of life and wanting to have some kind of infrastructure to deal with it, to cope with them. Ritual has become more important to me as I've gotten older. It's not always religious ritual, but it often borrows from Judaism.
. . . hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else . . . . Wanting life to be different from what it is. That's also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. It's as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first.
Perhaps if I was in a different profession, I wouldn't have worn 'trans' on my forehead. But there's a difference between not wanting to make a big deal out of something and fearing the effect it will have on my life.
I used to think that you could get to a level of success where the laws of the universe didn't apply. But they do. It's still life on life's terms, not on movie-star terms. I still have to work at relationships. I still have to work on my weight and some of my other demons.
That quote by this guy Friedrich Schiller, "Keep true to the dreams of thy youth"? That quote changed my life. It confirmed that every crazy thing I'd ever done at least was staying true to the dreams of my youth - and really, I mean very young dreams of just being able to have fun all the time.
For just once in my life, I'd like to get through a whole week without having to deal with some fool, white or black, who's got an attitude about the way I look.
When television is good, nothing - not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers - nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
When I got my deal with Cash Money, it changed my whole life.
It occurred to me then that a lot of life was either about wanting and not having, or having and not wanting.
I don't get tons of scripts to be looking at and deciding on in terms of feature films; the industry has changed. Fortunately, with television and streaming and original series online, there's this whole new thing that has opened up, which I think is fantastic.
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