Elvis' early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits.

Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.

We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.

Elvis' early music has drama because as he sang he was escaping limits.

It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.

No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.

It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.

Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term 'still' seems meaningless to me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else for pleasure.

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.

I learned that when something just has to be said to move the discussion along, or broaden it or deepen it, if I can just keep my mouth shut for five minutes a student will say it. So for me a lot of teaching is about keeping my mouth shut.

I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow.

I want another idea, another project, but you can't make them up. They show up.

I'm a fan of Oliver Stone. I like his movies, I like his excess, and I think he has a great capacity for empathy and it comes out more powerfully in this movie than in any of his other films, even the formal 'I'm identifying with the underdog' movies like 'Born on the Fourth of July.'

If 'Mystery Train' is my Nixon book and 'Lipstick Traces' my Reagan book, 'Invisible Republic' is my Bill Clinton book. I really liked Clinton. He made me proud to be part of this country again. For all of his failings, the way he put all that he'd done in jeopardy, I supported him from beginning to end.

Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them.

The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.

You're going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.

Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.

I did radio back in the era when we did radio drama.

By obtaining a sense of its place in the unfolding drama of life, set in an ecological theatre, so we can understand why it has become one of the leading players.

I had an amazing experience working with great people. I had a great family, a typical family with drama in certain areas, and that's pretty much everywhere in everyone's life.

Comedy is so hard; it's so much harder than drama. The pacing of it, the energy of it.

I was always a drama queen. I remember playing in the kitchen, trying to get my mom to think I was dead and call the police. When she didn't, I would cry. I was always theatrical. I don't think any of my relatives are surprised.

You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

I think the American West really attracts me because it's romantic. The desert, the empty space, the drama.

For me, football is just a game, not a drama.

The more commercial work that is happening, the more people are operating cameras and are setting up studio lights, the greater the opportunity for drama production to happen.

I'm doing music, and we both want to do some drama.

Culture clash is terrific drama.

I want to do drama, light comedy, the whole range.

We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.

I always feel like an interloper when I do serious drama. It's my own paranoia.

Michigan is two radically different places - the North and the South which makes for good drama and contrast.

When the time came to make a decision about what do in life, I found myself thinking that acting was the thing I loved to do, so I applied to drama school. And then, I didn't get in - twice.

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

I didn't get along with Lindsay Lohan on 'Confessions Of A Teenage Drama Queen', but you have to consider that we were 16-year-old girls. I haven't seen Lindsay since then, but I imagine she's grown and become a different person. I know I have.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

The Russian drama began at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union mercifully ended. Russia and 14 other new countries emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union. Every one of those 15 new states faced a profound historical, economic, financial, social and political challenge.

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

When you're young you have no worries, no drama, only your imagination. It's the best!

France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.

Movies are immortal art - the first new art since Greek drama.

The ideal situation would be to bypass all of the drama and mayhem and just get the music right to the people. I'm confident that we'll eventually figure it out.

We just happened to come along at time where there hadn't been a new young adult drama that also could appeal to adults as well in quite some time. We sort of found a little bit of a niche.

Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.