A.S.A. Harrison Quotes

What I ended up doing was becoming an actor who didn't mind doing other people's words.

Then when I got to Hollywood, the first musical I did was Festival in 1977.

But I always held my music up and protected it from compromise. So I just do it for my friends. I've written hundreds of songs, and I'm sure I have a few albums worth of songs.

I have to be very careful about how often I drag my family to places. They need some stability in their lives.

Life goes on within you and without you

Fear only the warm embrace of passive stupidity.

Music is such a problem in the time it takes.

People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.

Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it.

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.

I keep stacks of Autobiography of a Yogi around the house, and I give it out constantly to people. When people need 'regrooving,' I say read this, because it cuts to the heart of every religion.

My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.

Rome is all things high and low. It is like God, it accommodates so much.

I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes

I'm not an architectural composer.

Even those of us who are very very aware are still so unaware. Everything's relative so that, the more you know, the more you know you don't know anything.

I never feel sexy. I have a distant relationship with the mirror.

Writings like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.

I do not go to the gym. I do not train. I am not that careful about what I eat. I cannot give you any advice about keeping fit. The best advice I can give is choose your parents wisely.

I continue to develop some things for myself and also take advantage of good parts as they come along.

I like working. It is where I feel useful. I have no plans to cut down. I am happy with what I do. There will be a lot more of me yet, that's for sure.

He wanted that again, that feeling of standing with her against all odds and succeeding. He wanted it so bad, he was going to risk destroying everything he and his father had worked for.

Bikes and planes aren’t about going fast or having fun; they’re toys, but serious ones.

My mother was my first jealous lover.

It is a sobering thought that animals could do without man, yet man would find it almost impossible to do without animals.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

How wonderful it was to love something without the compromise of language.

The ones we choose to love become our anchorwhen the hawser of the blood-tie's hacked, or frays.

We can continue our quest for improvement or not. We can search for happiness, enlightenment, security or identity or not. The search is not wrong; it is unrelated to the actual world.

You get to the point where you decide that you don't want to be a victim anymore and that you're not going to live your life like that.

That transformation is to lose everything is an understatement so vast as to be without meaning. One has to lose everything, and one has to lose the one who has lost everything.

Happy endings were never handed out. You had to fight for them, earn them with bruised hearts and sacrifices.

I sometimes listen to music I made and find it to be something I wouldn't want to buy from a store, if there was a store. When it's like that, you have to make what you want to hear.

Hey, ah, does anyone want a cookie or something? Oh yeah. A cookie. That would make everything better. Dunked in a shot of tequila , maybe? Or better yet, just the bottle? Yeah, that ought to do it.

...treat people with understanding when you can, and fake it when you can't until you do understand.

Being poor is not an indication of potential or worth. It’s a lack of resources.

Hollywood's got its own particular environment.

People need to see what's going on, and they have to be exposed to the mechanisms that can help make it right.

Once you realize something, then you can't pretend you don't know it any more.

When I first started out, I was a bad actor.

I need a challenge. I need the intellectual stimulation. I'm a member of a community on each film, working in concert to try to bring an idea to life. It's a great job.

Baseball was a metaphor for America, both here and in terms of how it was understood by the rest of the world.

Telling the truth is like exposing the underside of our wings. We only see that part when we fly.

What's often in your heart is the hardest to reach.

An actor only has his own understanding and experience to work with.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

I found out that drama was a fascinating exercise as a way to get out of my self and into somebody else's head.