Sometimes I think that a parody of democracy could be more dangerous than a blatant dictatorship, because that gives people an opportunity to avoid doing anything about it.
Makeup and fashion are a very blatant way of expressing who you are because it's the first thing people see. With music, it's more personal, where people really are trying to get into your head and learn about who you are.
Ain't nobody gonna come from where I come from, keep it real as I did and make it with the local Detroit sound that has never made it in the industry before. Where I'm going, I don't feel like too many people from my city are going to blaze this trail.
A lot of these people, these program directors, just like anybody else in the world, even though they're supposed to be leaders in the world, they're followers. They follow what they think someone else is doing, instead of trying to blaze a trail.
One of the first times I ever performed in front of a big group of people was at my kindergarten graduation. I did, like, a Michael Jackson impersonation as, like, a five year old. I had the suit and blazer, the glove and the fedora, and I just performed a whole Michael Jackson song. I'm sure it was 'Smooth Criminal.'
In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific.
I try to give people hope. Even though life is bleak, there's hope out there.
What does the future look like if the heads of society ask our young people to risk their lives for questionable causes? I think it looks rather bleak.
For too many of our young people, that once-promised American dream has given way to an American debt burden and a bleak job market.
'Cunnamulla' is a beautifully bleak portrait of a lonely town in which people are leading lives of sort of quiet desperation.
Give me your crown, Jesus. Give me your cross, your thorns, so that I may bleed. But give me life, because I have more to do for this country and these people.
What makes it difficult for people trying to follow a dream is that the whole time you feel like you're slamming your head against the wall. So it's nice to make a breakthrough and not kind of lying there with your head bleeding.
Some people are afraid of what they might find if they try to analyze themselves too much, but you have to crawl into your wounds to discover where your fears are. Once the bleeding starts, the cleansing can begin.
When you're trying to come up with a good approach to reporting on the bleeding edge of where the conversation's moving, you're just leaving a lot of people who aren't on the bleeding edge of that conversation out.
I don't want to go around like some kind of bleeding giant or whatever, or thinking I'm a big deal, because it doesn't help you do your work. I think people like Hemingway got into an awful lot of trouble that way.
The pulse of the People is still so high as to call for more bleeding, before quinine can be administered with any hope of benefit.
When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.
People ask what my influences are, and for me, it's not always obvious. One of my biggest inspirations was Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders. That's based on how she just does whatever she wants to do, and I love her attitude about everything. It bleeds over into my way of thinking and comedy.
My family is mostly a chosen one. I've managed to invite some really amazing people into my life and they become family. Brothers, sisters, siblings, mentors, role models. And I like to live that way, where your family bleeds out into the larger community.
I really miss being able to blend in with people.
