Curiosity and listening [are the principles to an excellent interview]. I never go into an interview with a dedicated list of questions in which I will not deviate. You must be curious about the subject and listen to his answer and ask the next question off that rather than the next question on your list.
I think that Hollywood is sort of guilty of having a moral blind eye on this subject. While at the same time, you know, being involved in a lot of liberal causes and being involved very militantly, Hollywood is, in fact, guilty of helping to addict people to smoke.
But I never want to get to the point where I write a safe song or one that represents my sense of a subject in order to appear civilized.
Subject matter must be normal in the sense that it does not appear sought after so much as simply happening to one.
My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.
I'm out there to clean the plate. Once they've read what I've written on a subject, I want them to think, 'That's it!' I think the highest aspiration people in our trade can have is that once they've written a story, nobody will ever try it again.
The purpose of subject matter is to veil technique. The great artist uses the cloak of resemblance to hide the means.
Most photographers seem to operate with a pane of glass between themselves and their subjects. They just can't get inside and know the subject.
I glean a few times a week, and it's all about the subject line. I look for the lyrical, "Billowy Red Scarf Girl" or the funny, "Hipster Chick Who Passed Gas," the unintentionally funny, "Looking for the Hot Girl in Pink Dress," ones that immediately suggest images, "Furry Arms Under a Yellow Umbrella," or the plain odd, "Seeking Girl Who Bit Me Twice. . . " I don't think I've ever abandoned one. . . the images usually arrive fully formed in my head as soon as I read the message, and I decide whether to draw it or not.
I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject, the interviewee - actually tend to hold steady much more consistently in rural Africa than they do in the American inner city.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.
The subject isn't always a help to the photographer, it's like handcuffs.
What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. . . They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are within that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic gods they replaced.
Dropping of the atomic bomb was the main subject of conversation for many years and so people had very strong feelings about it on both sides and people who thought it was the greatest thing they'd ever done and people who thought it was just an unpleasant job and people who thought they should have never done it at all, so there were opinions of all kinds.
We can program ourselves to be the person we want to be, whatever the subject matter is, live in it by a mental physical program - a system of learning and doing. Studying all the greats in that field and becoming greater. I believe we are powerful, but we don't use our minds to full capacity. Your mind is powerful enough to help you attain whatever you want.
I did not feel a particularly strong call to any one subject, but read voraciously and widely and began to find science interesting.
If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.
Whenever you bring up women's internal workings, guys want to change the subject. Unless, of course, they're trying to change the laws.
I'm a pain in the ass to all of the costume designers with whom I work because I have very strong feelings about the subject.
It's hard to generalize about that subject because the women I've worked with have all been so different. But if there's one consistency, it might be that you do have to handle yourself differently on a set. Women can be more emotional - at least they sometimes show it more.
