A Quote by William E. Simon

My father's card-playing buddies treated me as a plain, ordinary, commonplace kid destined for mediocrity - or less. I suppose they expected that I would spend my life as a clerk of some sort.
Hollywood is a boys' club, and that's something I thought was a stereotype - and it's not. That really shocked me. Still shocks me. Everyone's helping their buddies out and pressing their buddies and playing tennis with their buddies and making movies with their buddies, and that grosses me out.
The true poetry of life: the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their loves and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.
I used to watch my father play the guitar and sing when I was a little boy. By the time I was 11, I knew what I wanted to do. My father really couldn't afford to spend $12 for a guitar for me, but he did. It was like an ordinary family spending $500 for a kid's gift.
My father was always pushing me to become a basketball player. In Africa, when you're a kid, every kid loves to play soccer, and I loved playing soccer. But my dad didn't want me playing soccer. He would joke, 'C'mon, man, you're too tall!' Then he promised me, 'If you start playing basketball, I'm going to give you my jersey.'
I love playing rock music, man. You give me a guitar in my hands, and I go out there, and, for me, it's like...you know, some dudes like hunting, fishing, going out and playing ball in the backyard with their buddies on a rainy day. I like being out with my buddies playing rock guitar. That's what I love to do.
I’d spent my whole life waiting to awake on an ordinary morning in the town that was destined to be my home, in the arms of the woman I was destined to love, knowing the people and doing the work that would make up the changing but essentially invariable landscape of my particular destiny.
I've felt the noose tightening for me for years at the major labels, where you're allowed to do less and less of what you would do most naturally and expected to do something that was expected to be saleable.
I was an imaginative kid. My sister needed entertaining, whereas I was the one under the table playing with a bit of fluff on the carpet. I was the sort of child who would spend time rolling up balls of all different kinds of fluff and that would be my little family.
At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.
My father was a certain kind of man - I saw how he treated my mother and his family and how he treated strangers. And I vowed I would never make a film that would not reflect properly on my father's name.
Scallops are expensive, so they should be treated with some class. But then, I suppose that every creature that gives his life for our table should be treated with class.
I don't think my dad really knew what to do with me, as a daughter. He treated me like a boy; my brother and I were treated the same. He didn't do kid stuff. There were no kid's menus; you weren't allowed to order off the kid's menu at dinner - we had to try something from the adult menu.
When I was still playing with dolls, I became aware of this terrible and incomprehensible thing for me: My father was not treated the same as others; we are not treated the same as others.
I'm gonna drive until my buddies can't lift me in the car, and I'll get some younger buddies if I need to.
The less you associate with some people, the more your life will improve. Any time you tolerate mediocrity in others, it increases your mediocrity. An important attribute in successful people is their impatience with negative thinking and negative acting people.
I had a moment a few years ago where I wasn't sure if I was acting for myself or because people expected it of me. A bit of a crisis of faith, I suppose. I did some soul-searching, took a break and decided I was going to live my life only for me.
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