Douglas Brinkley Quotes

We wouldn't last a year on the road playing music that we didn't love.

When I perform, I like to immerse myself in the music, and I just try to get off on the diversity of music.

To me, music shouldn't be ego-driven. When you go out on stage and play songs, it is. But when you're sitting in a room, writing songs, it's a completely different process. It's a completely different place. It's a creative place, a musical place. It has nothing to do with who likes what.

I'm basically always on tour.

I'm having fun just being a musician as well as an artist at this point.

I always say a song is like a ship. Once it has been made, you let it sail. Let the waves take it in the direction it wants to.

I really do love doing stand-up, and I don't see why it should affect the acting. And I just want more interesting jobs. I just want to keep doing stuff that's different, rather than saying, "Okay, I've become known for this, and I'll just do this from now on." If I feel like I've done this one thing, I never want to do it again. I want to do something totally different.

I really enjoy just being an actor. It's fun to be surprised by someone else's writing and to collaborate in creating a character and to leave all the hard decision-making to some other room full of suckers!

The clock always ticks. There are times you don't hear it, and there are times that you do.

I worked with dance a lot, for each character - different ways I could move my body, different music. It's the most fun thing in the world, because I love each and every one of the characters and I'd be happy just to play one of them, but the fact that I get to play upwards of six, seven, eight or whatever, it's a total dream.

I don't want to go to a foreign country and get lumped into that genre. I'm just looking at the bigger picture. This K-pop title might be good for now, but looking ahead it could hold me back, like a prison of sort. I'm a little wary about that.

I reenact everything. I love to paint a picture for my audience. I'm a lot like Richard Pryor in that aspect. I do a lot of acting on stage, acting out and visualizing stuff. I love to do that. I'm into it so much, it just comes out of me.

I never write anything down. I write onstage.

I know I'm not bipolar or schizophrenic, but this career allows you to explore, to take some facets of yourself and spin it.

I remember somebody saying something to me about Frost/Nixon, when Anthony Hopkins does his famous speech, and the difference in the way Anthony did it was to dramatize, essentially, what was a documentary-style version of that speech. I remember someone saying to me, "There is artistic liberty."

If I hadn't been a woman, I'd have been a drag queen

An entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself. An artist is on a journey: they don't know where they're going, what is going to happen, but they know they are not there yet, and there is some continuity and growth. I think of myself as an entertainer: I'm a performing entertainer, I'm a stand-up comic. But there's an artist at work here, too. One who interprets his world through his own filter.

I was rooming with Jimmy Bowen at the time, doing some gigs, then I went back to New Orleans and played there in '62.

With acting it's your neck up there in the end. And if you think the director can't help you it's one thing. But if you feel they're reining you in when they need to be giving you some rope, or vice versa, then I just don't tolerate that.

Acting is a really strange thing. You have to know when you're put in a bad situation, but you also have to be willing to do something very strange.

At the end of the day music is a grind. You're constantly working at it and even with playing shows as well. If your schedule isn't planned right it could really throw things off, but honestly at the end of the day its incredible being able to go to so many places.

You can put out an album and it could be totally out of the window as far as what you want to do performance-wise.

Bryan Cranston has got such an incredible light touch. He comes in egoless, but with bold opinions, and he wants to play. He wants to play. And that's what I've seen in great actors all my life and what I've always tried to nurture and keep in myself is that joy of playing.

The idea [of A Period of Transition album] was to get a break from everything for a while because I've been doing it for so long. I started doing it when I was 12.

I don't hesitate to do nudity as an actor if it's done well.