For me, I was given a great gift by my father and my mother in that I was never told any idea was bad. I was told I could explore any thought as long as I wasn't hurting someone else.
My mother never criticized any idea I had. She thought anybody could have anything. Even if I was in a poor family that worked at Ford Motor Company and lived in Dagenham. I could have told my mother that I wanted to work in pantomime. And she'd have said, "Great. I can help you."
Nobody told me there was any idea for a sequel to 'The Exorcist.' But my agent called me to tell me they were going to do it, and there was a part for me. I said, 'But I died in the first film.' 'Well,' he told me, 'this is from the early days of Father Merrin's life.' I told him I just didn't want to do it again.
I told my father I wanted to go to the stock market. My father reacted by telling me not to ask him or any of his friends for money. He, however, told me that I could live in the house in Mumbai and that if I did not do well in the market I could always earn my livelihood as chartered accountant. This sense of security really drove me in life.
You want to talk? Fine. Talk. Tell me something you've never told anybody else.' I thought for a moment. 'Turtles have the second-largest brains of any animal on the planet.' It took Isabel only a second to process this. 'No, they don't.' 'I know that's why I've never told anybody that before.
Hurt feelings or discomfort of any kind cannot be cause by another person. No one outside me can hurt me. That’s not a possibility. It’s only when I believe a stressful thought that I get hurt. And I’m the one who’s hurting me by believing what I think. This is very good news, because it means that I don’t have to get someone else to stop hurting me. I’m the one who can stop hurting me. It’s within my power.
When I was younger I was fat. I was never conscious of it and was content with who I was because I was so loved. My mother never told me to lose weight and my father doted on me, but my agent told me. I tried, but I loved Indian food too much.
I always revered people that I thought had an idea and proceeded through with it. I guess I've been that way since the day I called my father and told him I was going to study acting and maybe try to see if I could do well with that, and he told me: "Don't do that. You don't want to do that, that's just dream stuff. Get a legitimate job and move forward."
Everybody told me that if I insisted on doing rockabilly music, I'd never have a chance of selling any records. In fact, I lost count of how many people told me to ditch it all together, in favour, I guess, of sounding like everybody else.
My parents always told me I could do anything, but never told me how long it would take
When I was applying to college, my mother told me I could apply to any school within the Boston subway map.
When I was younger, I was a bit of a feisty fighter type of guy. That's something my father told me as I was becoming a man: 'You don't go picking fights, but you don't run from any of them.' And I was more afraid of my father than anybody else I had to fight.
My father, Benjamin Shiller, told me not to believe in authorities or celebrities - that society tends to imagine them as superhuman. It's good advice. People are snowed by celebrities all the time. In academia people have this idea of achieving stardom - publishing in the best journals, being at the best university, writing on the hot topic everyone else is writing about. But that's what my father told me not to do. He taught me that you have to pursue things that sound right to you.
A long time ago when I was very little, I dreamed about being on stage. Some people told me I would never be able to do it, so I only paid attention to those who told me that I could.
Know that, as in life, there is much that many have looked upon but few have seen because, as my father told me and his father told him, you will come to learn a great deal if you study the insignificant in depth.
My mother always told me that any talent is a gift of God and I always believed it. If I quit, I would just live in front of the television and get fat and die pretty soon.
No one told me that you could be alive and be happy. No one told me, and if someone had I wouldn't have believed them. I thought that you had to die - physically die - to escape.