I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions.
‐‐ Harvey Pekar
I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.
‐‐ Stacey D'Erasmo
I was influenced by European movies, old Fellini, old Kurosawa - any sort of foreign film.
‐‐ Ted Demme
I was influenced by every comedian I ever saw work. That's the only way you learn how to do it.
‐‐ Bob Newhart
I was influenced by many, many different people in my student years, and I was always, I guess, immersed in a Navy environment, and so, obviously, that had a big impact when I decided what I wanted to do was go and be a Navy pilot. I was very familiar with the Navy community and felt very comfortable with it.
‐‐ Alan G. Poindexter
I was influenced by Ray Harryhausen and Lotte Reiniger, with her twitchy, cutout animation, which I happened to see at a very young age, but also by the Warner Bros. cartoons, 'Tom and Jerry,' and of course Disney. And also by Fellini's 'Giulietta of the Spirits' and Kurosawa's 'Ran.' And by other American illustrators and painters.
‐‐ Henry Selick
I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.
‐‐ Kenneth Koch
I was influenced very much by St. Francis of Assisi, whose idea was to radically live the gospel. He was not a priest, or even a brother. He was a layperson. His whole concept was to emulate Christ through the gospels, and to live it in a radical way.
‐‐ Tom Catena
I was influenced when I was younger by the cartoon movies that Disney put out, like Cinderella and what not. I watched those movies over and over when I was younger and the music is ingrained into my head. Nowadays, I'm still humming the tunes. It taught me the fundamentals.
‐‐ Zac Efron
I was informed... that some... were dreaming and wished to return.
‐‐ Zebulon Pike
I was informed yesterday that there's a Twitter account for my laugh. Very hard to get used to things like that. Pretty amazing.
‐‐ Tom Hiddleston
I was initially a leading man, but only on television.
‐‐ Gary Cole
I was initially assigned to the American Consulate in Aden, not as Principal Officer but as a supernumerary officer to handle Yemen affairs. We had no resident diplomatic mission in Yemen at the time. People from Aden went up to Yemen regularly.
‐‐ Hermann Eilts
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
‐‐ Julian Barnes
I was initially rather charmed by David Cameron, but I think he's revealing himself to be a slightly darker and less charismatic figure than he first appeared. There's a brutality about him.
‐‐ Peter Capaldi
I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations.
‐‐ John Perkins
I was initially signed to a German label a few years ago.
‐‐ Emilie Autumn
I was initially very interested in public policy, but then after my masters at Harvard, I felt that it was important to get a better handle on the economics of it as well. I did my Ph.D. in macroeconomics, and my thesis - 'Why Is It That Some Countries Save And Others Not?' - was on savings.
‐‐ Dambisa Moyo
I was inspecting eyeglass lenses for a while. And I worked as a concession girl in a movie theater. And I was ironing before that. I always had some kind of a job. And then I started modeling.
‐‐ Rene Russo
I was inspired by a lot of people when I was young. Every band that came through town, to the theater, or the dance hall. I was at every dance, every night club, listened to every band that came through, because in those days we didn't have MTV, we didn't have television.
‐‐ Quincy Jones
I was inspired by all of it. 'The Avengers,' 'Harry Palmer,' 'The Prisoner,' 'The Man from UNCLE,' 'In Like Flint.' Of course, there's a huge shadow of Bond - Bond is the monolith of spy movies - but it's not just about Bond; there were a lot of other things that influenced me.
‐‐ Matthew Vaughn
I was inspired by Billie Holliday, and I really liked Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las because she wore tight trousers and a waistcoat on top - she looked hot.
‐‐ Suzi Quatro
I was inspired by Colin Farrell in the fact that he's Irish and has freckles but with black hair. I'm a bunch of different things, Irish, Polish, Native American, and French, but I wanted to tap into that Irish side and be freckle-y with black hair, so that's what I did.
‐‐ JoJo
I was inspired by how Red Bull isn't about the drink; it isn't about the product or the can. Red Bull is a platform to celebrate all that humans are capable of accomplishing. They built a lifestyle movement, a brand that sold this product.
‐‐ Nick Woodman
I was inspired by many teachers when I started my channel, Bob Ross being one of them. His voice was so soothing, almost like hypnosis. He was that great of a teacher, even the casual viewer could learn how to paint from watching his show. Growing up, I just remember him being so mesmerizing on screen.
‐‐ Michelle Phan
I was inspired by my dad; he played trumpet in high school.
‐‐ Bria Skonberg
I was inspired by the classic rock radio of the Seventies. They separated Chuck Berry and the Beatles from the Led Zeppelins and Bostons and Peter Framptons of the time. In many ways, classic rock became bigger than mainstream rock.
‐‐ Chuck D
I was inspired by the Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learned how to use the worldwide web.
‐‐ Sugata Mitra
I was inspired more by early Bette Midler. I do wear a fancy dress and very high heels - and extra high hair. My goal is to obliterate all earnestness.
‐‐ Ana Gasteyer
I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.
‐‐ Colson Whitehead
I was inspired to create 'My Life' so I could finally share a personal part of my life beyond my music.
‐‐ Mary J. Blige
I was inspired to do anything I could to get out of what I was doing... today, I'm motivated to pay the bills.
‐‐ Terry Zwigoff
I was inspired to make music since I was 7 because my aunt is a songwriter.
‐‐ Shamir
I was inspired to write this book by those who are sceptical of the power of freedom to change the world.
‐‐ Natan Sharansky
I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.
‐‐ Amy Tan
I was intentionally curbing the impulse to be funny and hiding the ability. I wrote any number of very serious attempts at poems, short stories, novels - horrible. At a certain point, I recognized that it was fun to write dialogue that had a degree of lightness and humor.
‐‐ Patrick deWitt
I was interested about how relationships change as you get older. You are great friends in your 20s. In your 30s, you get married. Your 40s are all about your kids. In your 50s, you get divorced, and your friendships become primary again.
‐‐ Hanya Yanagihara
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
‐‐ Tom Stoppard
I was interested in a lot of subjects from very early on. And that's uniquely Chicano because every Chicano I knew always had three jobs.
‐‐ Cheech Marin
I was interested in aerospace and flying, and the U.S. is really the best place in the world for flying.
‐‐ Kalpana Chawla
I was interested in big unknowns, and the brain is one of the biggest, so building tools that allow us to regard the brain as a big electrical circuit appealed to me.
‐‐ Edward Boyden
I was interested in both Western and Indian classical music.
‐‐ Satyajit Ray
I was interested in getting courtroom experience. When I was a young lawyer, the only way I could get real courtroom experience was in the criminal law field.
‐‐ Robert Shapiro
I was interested in implements of mass destruction - from an academic point of view.
‐‐ Dan Farmer
I was interested in Java the beginning, but the problem with Java is you do have to switch your platform.
‐‐ Miguel de Icaza
I was interested in maintaining the dignity and the hearts of the songs, letting them breathe and become what they are.
‐‐ Ryan Cabrera
I was interested in music and making movies about musicians, but my own experiences, and doing what it felt like for me to be a drummer? Nah, I wasn't interested in that.
‐‐ Damien Chazelle
I was interested in nuclei originally with my deuteron photo work because that was one of the fundamental forces, and the measurement was basic to new science.
‐‐ John Henry Carver
I was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera.
‐‐ Robert Ashley