A Quote by Michael Mayer

'Rigoletto' has long been one of my favorite operas, and it was on my short list way back when I first talked to Peter Gelb. I started thinking about what I could bring to this masterpiece, which has been seen all over the world for so many years.
I own a copy of the original 'Talking Heads' by Alan Bennett, which I purchased many years ago shortly after they were first broadcast. It's been lovingly well-thumbed over the years. They are magnificent. A masterpiece.
I'd already started directing short films when we were doing 'Lord of the Rings,' then videogame projects. So Peter's known that I've been heading towards directing for a long time. But I always thought my first outing would be a couple of people and a digital camera in the back streets of London somewhere!
When people were like, "Oh, wow, Donald Trump is so crazy. That's so nuts, what's happening?" in the 9 a.m. meeting, Jon Stewart was like, "No, I've seen this before, in Robert Mugabe. I've seen Trump as an African dictator. You guys don't know about nationalist rhetoric all over Europe?" "No, I thought we were the center of the world." He has the ability to actually talk about that in a real way: "Oh, I've been there. I've talked to people there. This is just the remix on stuff that's been brewing for three, four years." That's something very special.
I've published many biographies over the years and enjoyed working with writers on their research, discussing it, thinking about it and how it revealed their subject - and one day the impulse came to me to write a life of someone. I made a long list of possible subjects and [ Barbara] Stanwyck was on the list.
I'm old enough now that I've been around and I've seen a lot more things than I had seen when I started this program 27 years. I have seen presidents in action. I have been to the White House a number of times. I have been to fundraisers. I have been seen what happens at fundraisers. I've seen how elected officials treat fundraisers and donors and, believe me, the world revolves around them.
Flying, for some reason, has never been my favorite thing, but after taking some aviation classes and reading about it and learning about it... They've been doing this for over a hundred years, they've been to the moon and back; they kind of have a good system going here.
Duke has had many lightning rods over the years, it's a long list of 'em, a long list of white Duke basketball players that have been lightning rods. I didn't fully understand it before I came to Duke, but obviously I do now.
The resistance to my work, and to my way of writing, has been there from the beginning. The first things I wrote were these short short stories collected in At the Bottom of the River, and at least three of them are one sentence long. They were printed in The New Yorker, over the objections of many of the editors in the fiction department.
I think when wedding dresses are talked about, every woman has a different set of factors in her mind of what it could be because they've been thinking about it possibly for such a long time.
My activities, for which I gratefully accept this Award, are today what they have been for over thirty-five years and will be for the rest of my life: to counter governmental secrecy about the nuclear arms race that threatens the survival of life on earth; and to help build a world movement that will prevent a first use since Nagasaki of nuclear explosions, prevent or end interventions that could lead to such an event, and bring about a world free of nuclear weapons.
Peter Hart, who's a pollster that's - who's done many focus groups about Hillary Clinton, talks about a glass curtain. She talks about the glass ceiling. He says voters feel there's a glass curtain between themselves and Hillary Clinton. They can't relate to her. They feel they don't really understand her, and that's made it easier for her opponents, of which there have been many over many years, to define her the way they want to.
Since he was 17 years old in Atlanta, I think people always knew that there was something different about Key. He's obviously been able to adapt to so many sounds and time periods in his own way, which is clear from the long list of collaborators; but he has always retained an effortlessly weird perspective.
When Mike Hammond and I started Gateway 12 years ago on my father's cattle farm, we knew it could be big. We talked big. But there's no way we could have been prepared to go from less than $300 million in revenues to $5 billion in six years. You can't so much prepare for that kind of growth as sort of ride it and try to manage it.
I've been the target of haters for so long, for so many years. Ever since I was a kid and I first started the show.
To come out here and play on Woodstock grounds, first year ever headlining on the main stage there's nothing more iconic. [Mysteryland] is one of those festivals that holds down the legacy of dance music it's been around for so many years. It's been part of what we do for so long. It kinda makes sense to bring the tradition over here to America. The festival grounds of Woodstock, that's pretty epic.
I had been really obsessed with Jonestown for a long time - many years - and had read everything there was to read about it, seen all the footage and the documentaries. I found it really chilling in a personal way - the question of people submitting all their personal power and agency and independent thought it the name of a group or ideology. I could not find a way to write about it directly that didn't feel too heavy.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!