I've never met a genius. A genius to me is someone who does well at something he hates. Anybody can do well at something he loves - it's just a question of finding the subject.
I wake up some mornings hating me too.
Everybody has culture, even white people have culture, but its different with me. So in high school, I was hanging out with the black and Hispanic kids. I'm not hating on white people. I hang with white people, too, but that's where I felt most accepted because I could relate to them more.
I don't mind people hating me, because it pushes me.
If we're deciding about merch pieces, t-shirts or hats, they have to be well designed and cool enough for somebody to want to buy it and then wear it and walk around advertising me and my music.
I get accused of having a haughty smugness. I have a lopsided mouth. I can't help it. I was born with it. It looks as if I am smirking. I have had my publicist tell me, 'Don't do that smile on the red carpet.' I'm, like, 'That's my smile.'
It hasn't really made it easier getting film work. It's not like I can call up a studio or a producer and say - insert haughty voice here - 'It's Parker. I guess you might know me as the indie queen. I'm wondering if you have any projects for me to be in.'
Looking back on the long haul in my career, little films, big films, TV, the Western thing has been really good to me.
I think when you're a fan of music - at least the way I've been a fan to artists that have really touched me - you're with them for the long haul. They might do things that you don't understand or agree with, but I think I've always tried to hold my judgment and give them the space to do what they need to do.
To all my people back in Nashville who have been there from the start, you put your faith in me. You were there for the long haul.
I'd like to learn how to cook. I've hauled around this big, old, heavy Martha Stewart cookbook in my suitcase to Cape Cod, L.A., Paris. I don't know what possessed me.
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.
O, my past years in Rangoon are spectres to haunt my soul; and they seem to laugh at me as they shake the chains they have riveted on me.
I'm definitely not for any haunted houses. They're all scary to me.
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.
My dear sir, it haunted me for the rest of my life.
I don't believe my house was haunted. I think I had an overactive imagination, and I was so convinced that those around me became convinced, too.
I don't want them to read what I'm writing and say, 'I think that's right,' and agree with me. I want them to read something and then walk away and be haunted by it.
I love 'An American in Paris.' That's the one for me. Some of the visual ideas in that film are just haunting and very free.
I've never had an actual haunting experience, in the way you might anticipate a ghost in a movie haunting someone, but I do feel presences around me all the time, and I do feel that memories haunt us the way ghosts haunt us or might haunt characters in a film.
