A Quote by Robert Orben
Very few people ever meet celebrities. All we really know is what we read about them and the most memorable lines are jokes. That's how we tend to define what we think of a public figure.
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I don't much like being a public figure, because so often how people appear is not how they really are, and I think one of the issues about our society is that we make judgments about people on the basis of very flimsy evidence.
I've done quite a few things based on real events or real people, and I think that's always really interesting that you can read about them or, if you're lucky, you can meet them.
The most absurd public opinion polls are those on taxes. Now, if there is one thing we know about taxes, it is that people do not want to pay them. If they wanted to pay them, there would be no need for taxes. People would gladly figure out how much of their money that the government deserves and send it in. And yet we routinely hear about opinion polls that reveal that the public likes the tax level as it is and might even like it higher. Next they will tell us that the public thinks the crime rate is too low, or that the American people would really like to be in more auto accidents.
I realize how much I rely on the actors to really know the lines because I tend to forget what they are exactly, even though I've written them. I don't have them memorized. But when it's going well, there is that point where the actor starts to know more about the character than I do.
As I meet more people who were my heroes, I see there is something about them that rings true with all I've ever read and heard about them, and that's all that really matters.
As far as people communicating with each other well I think that listening is important. You know really trying to read between the lines of what some body is saying and trying to read their mind a little bit where there at because most people don't really say what they're feeling. Which is the bones of great literature.
In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.
I suddenly thought about being backstage, and I think it shocks you to meet the people you shared your bedrooms with. And a lot of them either take themselves too seriously or don't know how to take themselves at all. But I wanted to be aware in a very sarcastic way that every song I've written has probably been written about 12-16 times before. And doing that makes it very hard for me to accept serious singer-songwriters in the world, the up-and-comers, the ones who are out there who let that define their every move, who live and die and breathe for it. It's a bit of a tragedy, I think.
As an actor, you tend to live in a really small world, which is not very healthy. It is enriching to go to new places, meet different people know and learn about things which you didn't know about.
I don't know what it is about human beings but most of us really like reading about or observing sexual tension and romance. It's just so much fun. I don't know if there is some Darwinian thing in us that really responds to that, but I think the most memorable scenes to me in books and movies are the ones where a couple is about to kiss.
Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.
There are a few very small incompatible changes - I really doubt most people will ever run into them.
Most people don't walk around knowing what other people think about them, and I don't think it's healthy to know what faceless strangers who you'll never meet say about you.
Some people have read a few Marxist books and think themselves quite learned but what they have read has not penetrated, has not struck root in their minds, so that they do not know how to use it and their class feelings remain as of old. Others are very conceited and having learned some book-phrases, think them terrific and are very cocky; but whenever a storm blows up, they take a stand very different from that of the workers and the majority of the peasants. They waver while the latter stand firm, they equivocate while the latter are forthright.
There are few people who define the word, 'rock star' better than U2's Bono. He's revered the world over not just for leading one of the biggest bands ever, but for his very public work on behalf of the underprivileged in Africa.
Arthur Miller said one of my favorite lines ever, that he had the mother say to her two sons about a very unstable father in Death of a Salesman. She said, "Attention must be paid." It's one of the most resonant lines that I think he ever wrote, and I think attention must be paid to the truth.
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