Background Quotes by Kim Jee-woon, David Stern, Jim Yong Kim, Frank Abagnale, Ben McKenzie, Kevin Whately and many others.
My background is in acting, so I enjoy being able to show what I’m looking for. With acting, it’s very immediate when you show someone what you’re looking for, and the feedback is instantaneous as well.
My own basketball background was ripping up my ACL in a lawyer’s league.
Economic development and poverty alleviation are so complicated that I don’t think there’s a single background or a single discipline that is sufficient to tackle these great human problems.
My proudest moment was probably when my oldest boy finished law school and went on to become an FBI agent. It was just beyond my imagination that – with my background – my own son would become an FBI agent.
It’s against type in the sense of my background, but it’s with type in the sense that I am a loner who’s new to this business and sceptical about a lot of it.
Mum had regular mental tests with her specialist, but because of her academic background, she became brilliant at manipulating them.
I come from a traditional theater background.
There have been a couple of things I’ve been involved in launching that have been a bit more public, but I’ve always had other things tipping away in the background.
There’s certain countries that you can’t get in if you’ve got a criminal background record. There’s certain jobs in the States that you can’t get because you’ve got a criminal background record. That follows you the rest of your life… and that’s something you have to deal with the rest of your life.
Obviously, whenever the government is getting involved with speech, it gives me a lot of pause. I have a background as a journalist, so that’s something that I take very seriously.
I come from a middle class background. I have travelled a lot by trains and have lived in the world. It is a world I cannot get away from; I would not even want to.
I was quite a shy child – not chronically, but I tended to blend into the background.
I was asked to sing with Mavis Staples on a gospel compilation called ‘Oh Happy Day.’ And, you know, other than being totally intimidated at the prospect of singing with Mavis, I was honored. I don’t really have much of a background in gospel music.
I come from a TV background, so for me this more like doing a freeing theatre piece because we’d go into a room and do the scene, instead of doing it as a wide shot, medium shot, and close up with only the odd line of dialogue.
I have way too shady a background to get into politics. I was a crazy kid – I was in bands, and I don’t think I’d get very far before people started digging up stuff I didn’t want them to see.
I came up from a difficult background.
I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I’m not actually posh.
I like the idea of accessibility, coming from a lower-middle-class background myself, I feel like beauty and products should be accessible to all women over the world.
If I’d been from a different background, I could have gone to a grammar school, I suppose. I might have been a different person.
When I was a kid, I desperately wanted more background information on especially cartoonists.
When you see how fragile and delicate life can be, all else fades into the background.
I am myself of a mixed background.
News is so often a report of conflict, an account of problems, a thing of the day and even of the minute, that sometimes I think we make the background darker and the shadows deeper than they actually are.
Volunteering has been undervalued in Britain for a long time. Often it has been seen as a kind of cut-price, amateur version of work that would be better done by the state. When politicians speak about it, people hear in the background the sound of budgets being cut.
I was not put here to be a background character in someone else’s movie!
I have a background and an understanding of what’s happened in the Middle East that a lot of people don’t have, because there’s been no interest.
I’m from a working-class background, and I’ve experienced that worry of not having a job next week because the unions are going on strike.
I believe that there are certain things that could be taken care of that you don’t need a strong political background in.
When you have such a huge past, a big background as we have, you can play off that – a lot of people do. But we felt we wouldn’t have a legitimate future unless we put something new together.
When I moved to Mumbai I had no acting background and so was unable to make a breakthrough for years.
SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed. Not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education and not your social status.
I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.
A musician’s true talent is only tested through background music.
Making improvements to our background check system and cracking down on illegal gun trafficking are common-sense ways to prevent violence without punishing law abiding gun owners. We owe it to the American people to take real action to reduce gun violence in our communities.
I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I’d feared.
I felt better being in the background. That’s the way I like it.
I do have some theatrical background. I’ve written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don’t read is screenplays.
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
My music comes from my personal background.
There is a lot more opportunity now, and I welcome all the conversations we are having about diversity, about women and about class… I come from a very working-class background, and I think the class thing is still probably more tricky.
It’s hard as a young person of a different ethnicity or background to look at the TV and not see anyone who looks like you. Representation is very important.
The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.
Having a Congress with a more diverse educational and professional background would serve the country well. And given the budget challenges facing America today, we might benefit from a few more cold, calculating problem solvers, and fewer courtroom impresarios.
I have a crazy background in music, both as a performer and writer.
I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.
I’m very aware of my own background. I’m Irish, French, and then a little bit of everything else thrown in, ranging from German to Native American. We’re talking about tiny drops of blood.
I never want to hide my wrestling background.
Typically, when you look for role models, you want someone who has your interests and came from the same background. Well, look how restricting that is. What people should do is take role models a la carte. If there’s someone whose character you appreciated, you respect that trait.
Every gun sold should require a background check, period.
I started out coming from more of a concert music background. It just turns out that 20th-century music techniques lend themselves to scary movies and horror movies.
People like Spencer Tracy held up because they had the background originally, but to this day they never have changed Mr. Gable’s role, or most of them.
I did a lot of background and research on ‘End Of Watch,’ and I definitely used certain skills that I learned.
I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.
When I want to choose to work with someone, you know, I definitely have to do some research on their background and how they were raised as people.
If I were governor, and a bill came to my desk that provided for background checks at gun shows, I would sign that.
Maybe because I am from a sports background, I don’t give up easily. I am a fighter.
I’m much calmer when there’s no TV or music playing in the background.
All women, regardless of her economic status or racial background, have a right to vote, and no politician or regressive law should prevent her from doing so.
I come from a theater background, and if you’re doing a play, your audience is right there, and you’re able to have that one-on-one experience. Doing more TV now, when fans come up to me on the street and talk to me on social media, that’s a way to bridge that gap.
I come from a middle-class background and there was none to lead me through to movies.
Music is my passion, singing, performing. I play piano and musical theater is my background.
I had always sort of done dramatic things, and I love them; it’s my background. But when I think about ‘Fresh Meat,’ I just think about the cast and the crew that we had… we just had a great time.
I usually make sure that my stories are from Africa or my own background so as to highlight the cultural background at the same time as telling the story.
My background is sociology. Combined with my graphic approach, if I could do some film projects, I think I’d be very good at making documentaries eventually, but people don’t think of me for that, of course. But dialogue is something I know I can be good at.
I come from a background where you don’t show off the good things you do. It’s modesty.
Dancers have always been a kind of background image, we’ve always danced behind an artist or we’ve danced in a movie behind the actors. We’ve always been very secondary.
A liberal education… frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.
I think what makes the Byrds stand up all these years is the basis in folk music. Folk music, being a timeless art form, is the foundation of the Byrds. We were all from a folk background. We considered ourselves folk singers even when we strapped on electric instruments and dabbled in different things.
My fiction is almost always inspired by a character’s need or desire to rise above him- or herself. No one is perfect and some of us have much adversity in our lives; it is those people who struggle to rise above their nature or background that I find the most interesting and heroic.
With a photograph, you are left with the same modes of interpretation as you are with a book. You ask: ‘What do we know about the author and their background? What do I know about the subject?’
My background wasn’t one blessed with all the luxuries in life. Nothing is forever and I realize that.
It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.
I have a background writing screenplays and teleplays. I’ve tried to write prose and fiction but never really completed anything I thought worthy of publication or worthy of anyone else to even look at.
Today’s terrorists do not share a particular ethnic, educational or socioeconomic background.
I didn’t come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren’t without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.
Even in novels where the love relationship isn’t the focus, I feel like it’s often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life.
I wrote ‘The Facebook Era’ because I felt like it needed to be written, and I was one of the people who might be qualified to do so. Specifically, my background is that I developed the first business application on Facebook.
I’m a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background. I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum. I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater.
There are so many different criteria for my collecting, and I have to confess that the goalposts do shift. But obviously, with my background, I am particularly drawn to things that have been documented in contemporary magazines.
In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.
My introduction to track racing was through the background of cross country running, which is not a sport perhaps as popular in America as it is in England.
My whole background is character acting: weird costumes, fat suits, playing men, playing animals – I’ve never played anyone with whom there’s any overlapping Venn diagram.
Christianity emerged from the religion of Israel. Or rather, it has as its background a persistent strain in that religion. To that strain Christians have looked back, and rightly, as the preparation in history for their faith.
I’m not a comedian, I’m not a stand-up and I don’t come from a comedy background. I am an actor, but I’ve had a very fortunate foray into comedy, and it seems to have become a bit of a strength, and you can’t complain when you become known for something.
It was very useful to learn the history, the theory, and the art of building from a practical background.
Once I engage in something, I really engage in it, and I love the process of reading and researching because I come from an academic background.
I’m not really one of those people who goes and writes some big back story and agonizes over characters. I think you kind of can get it. For me personally, it’s just kind of more instinctive. But I don’t have kind of an acting background. I fell into it accidentally.
I can’t just listen to music walking down the street unless I have a reason to. I can’t just listen to music as a piece of junk in the background. It drives me insane.
Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won’t get it later on.
I thought to myself, ‘All right, let’s take a look at your resume. You have no financial background. You have basketball, that’s what you have, for your whole life.’
I think the whole DVD craze has provided opportunities for material that, for those interested in it, explains the whole history and background in getting a film made, which is great.
So in some ways my life, my background has been isolating and I think I’m a bit more scared as a person. I don’t walk alone or in the dark. If I go out the driver will wait for me to go into the house.
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
There is a real diversity of talent and background on the A list so as to better reflect our society in all walks. There are people who have been candidates before, Councillors, Doctors, business leaders, charity campaigners.
I do have musical background; I sing.
My father was brought up in a theatrical background, just as I was, and his father instilled in him the need to do everything properly and take responsibility for money.
See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn’t practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.
My father came from a very poor background, but I was very fortunate in the sense that we were never in need. My dad was determined to make sure that we didn’t want for things. He wanted to give us more opportunity than he had, a better shot at a better life.
There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it’s certainly present in the early work.
The years I spent paying my dues are in the background, and so are my concerns about whether my performance is good or bad.
I don’t have any type of sketch-comedy or stand-up background.
If you are socially isolated, you are more vulnerable to stereotypes and myths; you won’t have the opportunity to have conversations with someone who has a different social background than you.
Dancing for the length of time that I did, it centered me in such a way to be really in tune with my body, and I just feel like I’m physically able to do things because of my ballet background. Without ballet, I don’t think I’d look graceful at all on screen.
After ‘A Perfect Storm’ came out, I heard from a young reader, who had suffered a similar background as ‘Arizona,’ that I had helped her to find peace. That was the most amazing thing in the world to me.
It probably helps that my background is in the sciences and I can speak the scientists’ language.
In all the background scores I do, I take care to see that the theme enriches the storyline and does not deviate from the mood of the scenes, context, characters and the entire movie.
At this point, I feel fairly comfortable in terms of performance. I think having a sketch background actually helps a lot. Because my background is acting, and stand-up, in a lot of ways, is acting.
My whole background was in voracious book-reading.
I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.
The whole culture of my background was deeply Conservative.
People know my background and for people who need an improviser, I’m one of the people they think to use if I’m appropriate for the part.
We come from a more alternative rock band background, and it’s interesting to see the things that people think we should or shouldn’t do since our music is a little bit poppier.
I have a taekwondo background, but I also try to invent new moves and make sure that when I step into the Octagon, I’m a different fighter.
To write about the hijab is to step into a minefield. Even among those who share my cultural and faith background, opinions veer from those who despise it as a symbol of backwardness to those for whom religion begins and ends with that piece of cloth.
To fans in a festival setting it’s like a picnic. You want to have a good time with your friends in that crowd. And in the background you hear the band play, ‘Oh, that’s my favorite song!’ everyone is there to enjoy the afternoon and that’s about it.
I don’t have a background in design, so I think it’s always about what I see in the world and what inspires me. So yes, I am designing for myself. I’m going through this whole evolution, which is a process of growing up and going from modeling to styling to designing.
I have the background singers of Ray Charles, the background singers of Smokey Robinson, and the background singers of Barry White and I built a choir around that.
I really don’t know what makes a comedian. I think it’s a family background and environment. Yet if you put the same ingredients in another person, he may never utter a funny line.
In the initial season of a show, you’re figuring out your character and their life and their background and you’re putting together all the chapters of the book.
I think because of my background – I went through university and did an academic career and fell into acting – I’ve never had a game plan for my career because I got into it quite ad hoc.
Every life of a character is within a context. If I write detached from a social and political background, my story looks like a soap opera where everybody is indoors, not working and living off their emotions.
The vocal arrangements are a big part of the formula for a Bad Religion song – layered harmonies and background vocals. So when I start to describe the elements of Bad Religion’s sound, it starts to sound like a Christmas choir.
The change I want to see is a start-up environment where everyone, regardless of gender and background, feels welcome and safe; where sexual harassment or discrimination will not impede great talent from producing great impact.
I’m not from a retail background, but I am a shopper.
My whole background, my whole life was just lots and lots of theater, a lot of that being musical theater.
I came from a religious, homeschooled background; I had conventional views across the board.
At the time, I didn’t know that bass would not be enough for me. I’m not a bass player because bass is always a background instrument even to this very day.
The women who walk into Planned Parenthood clinics come from every background, every political persuasion.
Not long ago, in response to a spell of insomnia, I learned some of the principles of meditation, to empty my mind piece by piece. It was like the old game of jacks – cautiously lifting each jack clear of its neighbor until only the empty background remained.
I don’t think that coming from a privileged background makes you this monster who doesn’t feel things.
I made a living being a background singer for years.
The miracle of unity is being granted to us as we pray and work for it in the Lord’s way. Our hearts will be knit together in unity. God has promised that blessing to His faithful Saints whatever their differences in background and whatever conflict rages around them.
My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.
Having a stadium in France named after a footballer from the Ivory Coast, even if I’m proud of my France-Ivory Coast background, is a great proof of integration.
I take the subway all the time here in New York. I love people watching and trying to figure out everybody’s background, especially teenagers – they’re so uninhibited when they display puppy love. I concoct stories in my mind: ‘Are you guys like Romeo and Juliet?’
What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background, but motivation, perseverance, and desire – the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.
Technology is usually there to let some process go on hidden in the background. For us on ‘MythBusters,’ we’re always trying to make the process apparent. So, we have learned to try and never rely on a technological solution when an analogue one is in front of us.
I come from an almost wholly secular background and have no quarrel with religion.
I always devise a background so that it makes what your character goes through logical and keeps up the continuity.
I don’t come from a film background. I haven’t learned anything about films or film-making. But I have a thirst to know everything about my profession. I want to learn about cinematography, about editing, about music recordings, about post-production. So when people in the know talk, I willingly listen.
I personally have a background of many days on end of confusion, understimulation, overstimulation, and uncomfortableness with the world around me.
I use myself as a template for my comedy. So first my background as a Muslim man, my being a doctor, I talk about my family quite a lot, my kids. Anything that resonates with me I talk about. The important thing is it should be able to work in a family setting.
My upbringing was middle-class but my parents’ families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.
Sometimes it’s less about the character and more about the story for me. I’ll play a rock in the background if I think the story is fantastic and I can be a part of it somehow. That’s what I look for.
The food was interesting. My background is Russian, so cheese and potatoes are my love. There was plenty of that. And fried cheese! It is really, really, really good. And really, really, really bad for you. It’s like an artery on a plate.
I learned my profession onstage. I didn’t have a musical background. I had no conservatory training. I don’t play an instrument.
I’ve got a particular way of writing novels, and that carries over into the way I write comics and games, too. I’m a news journalist by background, so I approach everything as reporting – I treat it as real, I ask the questions I’d ask in a real situation, and I let the characters speak for themselves.
I’m proud of my background, so I hope there will be more roles where Hispanics are being portrayed.
My background really comes from geekdom and the idea of building a smart machine. If we’re going to build a smart machine, let’s have it read good books.
I do come from a theater background, where the playwright is optimal and king and you have to serve the playwright. So I am, of course, a huge fan of scripted everything.
Songwriting is different from music, although I don’t deny now that it would be nice to have a little more background in music theory.
I think that people, despite my law enforcement background, view me as taking these consistently progressive stands, and I think that, philosophically, there is a desire to get at that person. But I think the stands I have taken are totally consistent with a person who is looking at things realistically, factually.
I did recording sessions as a musician as well as a background vocalist and enjoyed every minute of it. I remember singing harmony with Waylon Jennings on a few songs that were hits. Chet Atkins always put me up so high that I strained to hit every note. It was a lot of fun.
I believe that this idea of story or myth or this thing that Joseph Campbell writes about is sort of an inter-connective spiritual force – like The Force in ‘Star Wars’ – where it doesn’t matter where you were raised, or what your background is, there are certain elements of story that totally appeal to you.
I always step back and look at – you know, look at my background in playing team sports my whole life and taking that approach into Congress. It’s not about me going, and you know, feeding my ego going to Congress.
Chicago is a lot of my background as a chef.
I come from a background of experimental music which mingled real sounds together with musical sounds.
I’m from a fancy, well-raised background. We were very well-behaved and not allowed to swear. It’s the kind of place where people hide their problems under the rug and pretend it’s all perfect. Eventually, you get sick of that.
I am much less autistic now, compared to when I was young. I remember some behaviors like picking carpet fuzz and watching spinning plates for hours. I didn’t want to be touched. I couldn’t shut out background noise. I didn’t talk until I was about 4 years old. I screamed. I hummed. But as I grew up, I improved.
What’s genius about ‘Gravity’ is that you are close upon the actors, but 3D works best when you have foreground, middle ground and background.
My background did not start with the East Side; it started with Greenwich Village, which is West Side.
I come from a theater background. I studied acting at NYU and also the Groundlings in L.A.
In the last three years of racing I’ve met as many women fans as men fans, and in NASCAR it’s the same thing. My wife loves cars, but the difference is she doesn’t have 20 years of understanding the background of them. She basically drives them and uses her gut feelings as to which is best.
When you come from a background like mine, where you’re entering worlds that are so different than your own, you have to be afraid.
Mom was always doing something for somebody. She came from a Czech background, one that made her a devout Catholic and gave her a strong belief in the family.
I was aware of it, but I grew up in a very a-religious family. My mother never went to church, she never had any religious training or background. It was never a part of our social interaction.
My background is in dance. No, I’m kidding. I was actually really uncoordinated as a child, when it came to dance, but I did play a lot of sports, and I do some break-dancing from time-to-time. No, I really don’t.
Every American, regardless of their background, has the right to live free of unwarranted government intrusion. Repealing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act will reign in this gross abuse of power and restore to everyone our basic Constitutional rights.
God has a team. It’s made up of African-American, Anglo, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, and a variety of other people and cultures. He never wants you to make your distinction, your history, or your background so precious to you that it messes up His team.
I’ve had a very unusual background in science – not the usual route of planning on being a scientist from age 3. I think my story shows that success is more about personal motivation and determination than it is about where you were born or what your economic status was.
It is feasible for someone who comes from a privileged background to understand the privilege they have had and to use the formal political arena in a way that would disperse power and engage with people in their own lives.
I know in my own marriage I stayed in it to provide my son with what I thought was a stable background and to give him what I thought was the family life a child should have with two parents. But that isn’t always the best way, and it took me taking my son to therapy after the divorce to really see it.
I come from a strong religious background, and I had a very conservative upbringing. So I was nervous, and confused. Here I was wanting to be Whitney Houston, so why did I have to dress in lingerie to do that? I didn’t get it.
The word that I constantly hear out of women is ‘fear.’ It’s almost like a background melody. Women have excellent degrees and experience, but we are afraid we aren’t good enough because we have such high expectations.
My undergraduate degree is in business, so I’m trying to get a bit of a background before I go in.
Further Education should be about the ability to learn, not the ability to pay – everyone who is able should have the opportunity, regardless of their family background. I don’t want to see students struggling with huge debts or frightened off even going to university in the first place.
In the India I was growing up in, history wasn’t really a wise career option. People would joke and say, ‘History’s okay, but what’s your actual job?’ I didn’t come from a privileged background and couldn’t afford to be irresponsible, so I did the pragmatic thing and did a MBA.
The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode – an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background… For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.
Anybody who sits down to write, and they think ‘thriller,’ maybe shouldn’t be thinking that way. Maybe we should be thinking ‘novel,’ maybe ‘thriller’ way in the background, but that these are real people to whom things are happening. It just happens to be a hell of an exciting story.
Before anyone learns my last name, they always assume I have some type of Latin background in me somewhere. I love it! I think the Latin culture is sexy. It’s one of my goals to learn to speak Spanish one day; then I will really be able to fool people!
I love folk; that’s a big part of my background.
I have a strong Lutheran background, and my parents instilled in me strong morals.
My background has made me the person I am today. It’s made me a mentally and physically tough guy.
Expanding background checks will help create a uniform standard for all gun purchases and prevent criminals and the dangerously mentally ill from obtaining powerful weapons.
My food is Louisiana, New Orleans-based, well-seasoned, rustic. I think it’s pretty unique because of my background being influenced by my mom, Portuguese and French Canadian. There’s a lot going on there.
The lighting is so important. One thing that makes me nuts about the lighting now is that they spend an enormous amount of time lighting the set, the background. But the most important thing in the scene is the actor.
To give you some background, I represent the largest manufacturing district and the largest agricultural district in Ohio.
The results indicate that heterogeneity of race and heterogeneity of family educational background can increase the achievement of children from weak educational backgrounds with no adverse effect on children from strong educational backgrounds.
If I get blocked, it is generally because I don’t know enough about some aspect of the story or the characters. The answer for this is generally more research, or making more background notes, so the place and person can be more fully realized inside my own mind.
My background’s working class. My parents had to work to make ends meet. We don’t come from any sense of privilege.
Work all paled into the background as soon as I had a baby.
Coming from an African background, obviously the foundation of the family home is education, probably because my parents had to work a lot harder for everything that they’ve got in this country.
Yeah, so I have, like, a YouTube channel where I kind of use my engineering background to make sort of ridiculous things.
I was raised never to carp about things and never to moan, because in vaudeville, which is my background, you just got on with it through all kinds of adversities.
My real background was in art studies. At the beginning I was a painter, then I was this graphic designer, then I became an illustrator, then I was a comic artist. But for me it’s a different way of expression, a different field of art. They’re not separated; everything for me is related.
As a regent, I hope to bring that important perspective of a typical family visitor in combination with my background as a Member of Congress and a proponent of the Smithsonian’s efforts to reach all Americans.
Should we have background checks, waiting periods? To drive a car you have to pass a test that shows you know how to drive your car safely, you should have to do the same thing with guns.
Like many actors, I started off as a monkey. My first job ever was as an extra in Tim Burton’s ‘Planet of the Apes.’ I’m the tiny little monkey in the background. I met Rick Baker doing that – then, because of my size and the fact I was older than 18, he figured I could double Daveigh Chase in ‘The Ring.’
To have people with – with psychological problems have a background check before they can buy a weapon? I don’t think the NRA would pull me off that one. If they do, then I need to be pulled off it because… you can’t give a weapon to someone who has mental issues, right.
A lot of people of my Ulster Protestant background would have been very suspicious of the notion of a film about Bloody Sunday. Our fear would have been that it would be terribly anti-Britain and anti-soldiers: a piece of nationalist propaganda.
The Jewish background is not that far from the black groove. Blacks are downtrodden, Jews are downtrodden, therefore they have something in common in that affliction. Being downtrodden often makes one more empathetic and sympathetic.
I come from an academic background. I wasn’t raised to be into promoting myself.
I came from a hospitality background and saw that 80 percent of seats in cars weren’t occupied most of the time.
My family background was deeply Christian.
Civilization must be based on life. We should never forget that human life was created in and for millions of centuries, was nourished by primitive wildness. We cannot separate ourselves from this ancestral background.
I come from a very loving, stable background where I’ve been persuaded to just be myself and anything is possible.
I grew up with a very privileged background. My father served as one of the cabinet ministers in Arroyo’s government, and he’s been a congressman for many years, and he’s running again.
I grew up on food stamps. I come from a very humble background. And I’ve had many friends that have been destitute – you know, running into trouble – and places like The Midnight Mission have given them hope and have fed them and gotten them back on the right path.
I come from a very conservative background.
I have a lot of endurance and I have a good background right now in my training and it’s time to get ready.
The biggest surprise to people is that I sang background on Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ album.
I’ve been a conservative my whole life. There is nothing hard-right or far-right about anything. I just believe in ideas and that ideas matter in history, and that’s my background, and that’s the way I’d like to be portrayed.
I’ve always been the DJ or the bass player or the drummer, somebody in the background. I don’t think anybody who knows me personally would say that I’m particularly shy or introverted, but I’m definitely not like Mr. Attention.
Eventually the consumer will come to appreciate the editorial point of view of every different brand. User-generated content without editorial oversight will simply be background noise.
I studied audio engineering at university. The background I am from, music was never seen as a viable career; it was always a hobby.
I will say go into the world and try to find good people that feel genuine affection and love for you, and disregard everything else about their background.
If you’re a wildlife filmmaker and you’re going out into the field to film animals, especially behavior, it helps to have a fundamental background on who these animals are, how they work and, you know, a bit about their behaviors.
I create my own backstory regardless of if I’m told something about the background or not. There’s always more that you can develop in your head that makes a character more layered, more honest.
I don’t come from a privileged background.
The closest person in the industry to me who is like a big brother is Tyrese. He gives me a lot of good advice. We both do the same things. We’re both from the same background.
I always had a knack for improvisation. I can write down the notes I play, but never really had a proper academic musical background. I suppose I’m blessed and cursed by the fact I have that freedom.
My background with Cummings was rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, but Tuesday liked to walk in and do the scene. I must say that she was really wonderful. Aggravating, but wonderful.
There’s nothing in my background that would have said I was destined to be a senior politician.
I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge regardless of their background or life experiences.
My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups – development, testing, marketing, user education.
My background is in improv and writing.
I should like to say that I am as proud of my Chinese heritage and background as I am devoted to modern science, a part of human civilization of Western origin, to which I have dedicated and I shall continue to dedicate my work.
I’d love to do a film like ‘Chicago.’ Something musical because I’ve obviously come from that background.
I went to film school so I have a writing and directing background, and I think a lot of the material I’m interested in writing and getting out there is stories about anti-heroes and people you should just not ordinarily root for – trying to figure out a way of appealing to people they wouldn’t normally appeal to.
So if you want to have a great video game-based movie you have to keep the mood of the game, use the normal character setup – but you have to flesh out the story and provide more background for the characters.
I think I’m a vocal genius, not a musical genius. I like background vocals. I consider myself a voice, not a singer. A voice is a sound, and singing is what you do with that sound.
The revolution is carried out by means of one’s thought, not through one’s family background.
Nothing in my background has anything to do with films. In that sense, I am a complete outsider.
I think that what most surprises anybody who goes into politics from even a modestly cerebral background is the vulgarity of much of the cut and thrust of politics.
I really looked up to Tina Fey as a writer, and because I did have a background in writing, she is someone whose career I really did admire.
I come from a very humble background. My father had to work really hard to become an assistant director. For a large part of his youth, he worked in a mill and took up odd jobs to make ends meet. We lived in a small room and could only afford a meal a day.
Learn computer science. It’s extraordinarily helpful. I like recommending learning economics as well so they think in terms of business, they have rational frameworks for looking at the world, but yeah, computer science is an amazing way to get into, even if you want to be CEO, having a tech background is helpful.
Without my husband’s costumes I wouldn’t have known how to accomplish what I saw in my own mind’s eyes for choreography. And then seeing our choreography and knowing the background of it I am sure helped my husband a great deal with what he designed for us.
When playing any song in front of an audience, you’re watching them experience it, and it changes. In a lot of ways, it’s almost like the music is just the background buzz to what’s happening between you and the audience in the room.
I come from an alcoholic Irish background – I know where I was going! But I met my wife and started to practise Buddhism, which is a levelling experience for me, and there hasn’t been a day I’ve missed in 40 years. I apply it to everything – to my work and relationships. I try to be a compassionate person.
I had an affinity for criminal law because I came from that background. I understood it. A lot of lawyers of color understand the inequities of the system and become defense attorneys.
I have a background in graphic design and have been designing t-shirt graphics for years.
A producer is always behind the scenes, even more in the movies – nobody sees you. I didn’t even meet most of the actors. When I worked on ‘Top Gun,’ I never met Tom Cruise. You were always in the background.
You know, it helps having an African American driver behind the wheel. I’m representing that culture and that background. But a lot of background pressure, I don’t really put that on me. I know I have enough pressure to go out and perform every week.
My experience growing up in London and growing up in a working class background is that when people are down and out, that’s when they’re probably the funniest. They have to be. That’s what they do to cope, to find joy, ’cause they don’t feel the joy inside. Or they use humor to keep people out.
As far as favorite ‘overall package’ record of all time, I’d have to say ‘My Girl’ by The Temptations. I like everything about it, not only the composition – but the arrangement, the production, the lead vocals, the background vocals, the horns, the strings. That one I listen to over and over again.
One of the things I liked about my character in ‘Run’ is that she can just disappear into the background if she wants, which is what I’m like.
Twitch is a platform. Switch it on, and you’ll find thousands of channels of pure gameplay rolling around with people talking in the background. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll also find people talking on camera, with sets built like an actual talk show, and schedules of events posted at the bottom of the web page.
It’s more fun in a way to do ensemble scenes, where you know your background, you know the scene, but you can’t prepare because someone else is going to say something that is going to lead you off.
I come from a modest background. I put myself through college and law school and a postdoctorate program in tax law.
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.
I come from a background where money has never been an issue.
Seriously, I wanted to be an artist because I saw that it meant endless possibilities. I came from a badly managed family background, so art was a way of reinventing myself.
The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant, and I’ve seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic.
‘Porgy and Bess’ has never been thought of as a dance show, and yet it’s filled with dance. It uses dance to punctuate the action, or as background, or as atmosphere; even when it’s front and center, it isn’t crucial.
My mother was the influence on me – my father was absent. He was a diamond dealer; he was doing wonderful things in the background, and women were left at home. So my mother really was in charge of everything: the ballet, dance lessons, piano lessons, and latkes.
I come from a background where you don’t really talk about yourself much.
The American cinema in general always made stories about working-class people; the British rarely did. Any person with my working-class background would be a villain or a comic cipher, usually badly played, and with a rotten accent. There weren’t a lot of guys in England for me to look up to.
Generally, what adults want to know is my background, why I write what I write, and very personal insights that some say are inspiring.
When a director narrates a character, I find it normal to ask questions about the character’s background, mood swings, eccentricities, behaviour… I do this to make my performance relatable. Directors who don’t know their characters well find it difficult to answer these questions and, hence, find me annoying.
I’ve known a lot of religious people. My mother is very religious, but she also is very private about it. When I was growing up, she never went to church. She just prayed and read her Bible and kept it to herself. I’m not from a background of flamboyant believers. It’s much more a personal issue.
I love fashion, but I don’t come from a background of loving clothes, and I remember feeling badly dressed from a young age.
Coming from a farming background, I saw nothing out of the ordinary in running barefoot, although it seemed to startle the rest of the athletics world. I have always enjoyed going barefoot and when I was growing up I seldom wore shoes, even when I went into town.
If you have to tell a story without speaking, it’s sort of like – I come from a dance background, so it’s like a ballet where you have to tell a story with just your body. I think that’s really interesting to have to tell a story with just your face and your mannerisms, and I’d like to tap into that world.
I’ve sung background for a couple of bands.
I have a neuroscience background – that’s what my doctorate is in – and I was trained to study hormones of attachment, so I definitely feel my parenting is informed by that.
I’ve been shocked by film actors – 25 and under – having such confidence and cockiness to rewrite a scene. My background is more about the director being in control. It’s all about yielding. It’s an oddly submissive relationship in which you’re moulded, Pygmalion-style.
Obama doesn’t run around wearing a Carrie Bradshaw-esque nameplate necklace that says ‘Socialist.’ But his policies, actions, words, background and associations speak louder than any ID necklace ever could.
I entered the literary world, really, from outside. My entire background has been in sciences; I was a biology major in college, then went to medical school. I’ve never had any formal training in writing.
My parents are Jamaican immigrants and both have a multiracial background. They’re Jamaican but my genetic makeup is West African, European, Asian.
I don’t come from money or an educated family background or any sort of supportive family life, so all of my choices are made on my own.
I feel blessed to have had such a background, where animals, food raising, harvesting and canning were a natural part of life.
Most people say I look mean, and because I play so many tough roles and because of my size and my martial arts background, they think I am, but I’m really not.
I once did an event with Ian Rankin where he said he didn’t really need to do much background research because his books are set in the present, and I just thought: ‘You lucky, lucky beast!’ because as a historical novelist, I live constantly on the edge of wondering whether tissues had been invented.
I find it fascinating that sport has such a strong connection to success in business. Arguably, C-suite women are some of the most successful women, and more than half of them played at a more advanced level than just the general population of women in business that had sport in their background.
Food as a hobby used to be an elite pastime, and it has become something that is totally ordinary for people of every background. In that way, we see the growing up of the American food scene: that it’s okay to be a regular person and be really into food.
Both parents were very encouraging – especially my father. My father thought the sun rose and set with me. Neither one had a musical background or any musical talent. They liked classical music, but neither could carry a tune.
Few of my classmates looked like me. While we shared similar aspirations and many good times, there’s much to be said for making any challenging journey with people of the same cultural background.
I came from a socially deprived background when I was 15, 16 years old, but one thing I knew was one – you don’t abuse a policeman, and two – you don’t steal things.
By background I’m both a Quaker and a Yorkshireman, which I like to call double jeopardy.
The background – your own history – is way more important than what you can achieve as a professional.
My mother’s background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.
I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.
Because my musical background is so diverse, it lends me to have very much my own style and it helps me to relate to the music as I’m going to play it. I just write. And if it comes out country, it’s a country song. The funny thing is, I write all across the board. I just write what hits me at the time.
People sort of imagine Chris Morris and me sitting somewhere dark, with dripping taps and chilling background music. In fact, we like to sit on his roof in the sunshine – and there’s an endless amount of just sitting there, going, ‘So, erm, er, what shall we do?’
I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.
I find something fascinating about the quiet man in the background who has no desire to be the center of attention.
My early novels were very understated and English. Fourteen years ago, I met and married my American husband, and as I learned more about his background and culture, I became interested in using American voices.
My background was in graphic design, but when I was doing it, it was all hand-drawn stuff, not computers.
I really appreciate the sport background because the structure and the discipline that that gives a person is incredible, and it just carries with you wherever you go.
My parents came from a poor background and worked their way up because of education. They saw it as a way to succeed. So they cared about me getting straight A grades when I was growing up.
Music as background to me becomes like a mosquito, an insect. In the studio we have big speakers, and to me that’s the way music should be listened to. When I listen to music, I want to just listen to music.
My background is that I came from a middle class family, and I think those values stay where ever you go.
I mean simply to say that I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.
I grew up very much in a sporting background. I always wanted to be an actor, but my escapism always came in sports.
Creating the fictional background for a game world isn’t significantly different from creating a background for fiction.
I’m trying to push for common-sense gun reform and mental illness reform so we can make sure that these individuals that have a criminal background that are mentally unstable and have a history of domestic violence are no longer able to get a gun.
To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.
The race is your face. Obviously, I come from a mixed background. Who I am and how I look and being black.
It doesn’t matter where you’re from. You can be from the hood or the suburbs. You can be poor with no education or a college graduate. No matter your background, you can win.
I do like to just have football on, so I will TiVo, like, three or four games for the weekend, and I’ll just turn it on when there’s no live football on, just to have the background noise.
I’m just a husband waltzing in the background.
In some cases, the casting directors have casted blindly and have not looked into my ethnic background.
My family wasn’t involved in the college. They were more of just your ‘white trash’ kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.
My mixed-race background made me a broad person, able to relate to different cultures. But any woman of colour, even a mixed colour, is seen as black in America. So that’s how I regard myself.
I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth.
When everything is stripped away in life, everybody is a human being that has problems, that has issues, has flaws, that isn’t perfect. It doesn’t make a difference what your sex is, what your sexual preference is, what your race is or what your background is. If you’re a good person, you’re OK in my book.
I had a brief theater background and loved the backstage world there’s more backstage work in television, so I saw a job advertised and applied, and got it. That was back in 1977, when getting jobs was easy.
Since I don’t come from a privileged background, I couldn’t afford to be irresponsible with career decisions. I wrote two books alongside my job and resigned only when I realised I can make a living.
I would say that although my music may be or may have been part of the cultural background fabric of the gay community, I consider myself an outsider who belongs everywhere and nowhere… Being a human being is what truly counts. That’s where you’ll find me.
The majority of my background is multi-camera format, which is very broad and a very arch perception of reality. Whereas single camera tends to be more truthful and a little more intimate of a medium.
I have so much respect for people who do blue-collar work because I come from that background myself.
I was a ‘Glee’ fan before I joined the show! Since my background is musical theater, it was exciting to see a TV show that incorporated music so much and in such a genius way.
Every life – regardless of background or gender – has equal value.
How much can you do with two voices? You can sing thirds or you can sing fifths or you can do a background harmony.
All my songs were solo voices. Just me singing. In fact, that was the gimmick – no gimmick. Just singing straight with not too much background.
I got the call to play Tony Manero in ‘Saturday Night Fever’ in Madrid, a role I’d always wanted, as it’s such a well-constructed show, and my background is in musical theatre. I’d been travelling back and forth between London and Spain for auditions and had been borrowing money from friends to do it.
My wife Juliana and I first saw Eurovision while on our honeymoon in Greece in 2006, and we were amazed by it. They basically recreate a music video onstage, and pyro cannons, LED video screens, background dancers, fireworks, costume changes, and wind machines are their tools.
I won’t be allowing my own background or my own sexual orientation to dictate the decisions that I make.
I’m not the only guy who doesn’t have an independent wrestling background. You know, I have a football background, but I also have a wrestling one.
The relationship I have to my fatherland is like that of mothers with crippled children: they love them all the more, the more crippled they are. Germany is the background of all my plans, the return to Germany.
My background is in tech. I studied computer science, and was working on TechTV, so the first thing I wanted to do was see my favorite motherboard stories hit the front page; you know, like, really geeky stuff.
Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I’m interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.
I definitely think the fact that I come from a multicultural background, my mother living life in a white skin and having white skin privilege from the time I was little, I was aware of that.
I’m of Russian-Jewish background. Like many Soviet Jews, my parents were engineers. My family migrated from Ukraine to Israel when I was six. They arrived in Israel with very little… Within a year of arriving in Israel, the Yom Kippur War happened.
My music has a very spiritual background, a sanctity that is almost like worship.
I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I – supposed fruit of their love – no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me, nothing is sadder than my parents’ divorce.
I’ve always been a happy-go-lucky person. I haven’t got any dark tales, I didn’t draw on my own past, I’m from a very normal stable background and had an amazing childhood, and I haven’t got any complaints really.
I come from a background where bigger women are appreciated. After all, you can’t belly dance with a flat stomach, so my ideal body would be curvy, womanly and voluptuous.
I have a dance background. I have an athletic background.
Everyone – regardless of their background, wealth, race, faith, gender, sexual orientation or age – should be able to fulfil their potential and succeed.
So many deaths could be prevented if measures were implemented to expand background checks and keep individuals like John Hinckley from ever buying firearms in the first place.
There’s only so long you can play the silent type standing in the background. ‘GoldenEye’ was good for that. I was the villain: James Bond was doing all the heavy lifting. I liked that.
I come from a very working-class background.
My athleticism was really the core to social acceptance, because in those days the overwhelming number of students came from more of a public school background than I did.
My background is in physics, so I was the mission specialist, who is sort of like the flight engineer on an airplane.
I’m fascinated by the way Diane Arbus saw things. She came from this fashion background and then twisted it.
I grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts. My background was modest, and I worked at a Portuguese bakery in town.
I had a background in theater as an actor, and then a photographer, and then as an experimental filmmaker and editor.
You know, I find it so difficult being a… as a matter of fact, little do people know that most of the leading members of the cast have a background that they would never expect them to have, and play the show they did.
My songs aren’t bubble gum pop dance songs and I don’t have background dancers on every single song.
I come from a very working class background. My dad worked in a factory for 40 years. We all put ourselves through school.
For me, the challenge of a period film is that, unlike a contemporary film where the character can be very free-form when it comes to the acting, there’s a burden to acting in a period film because you have to stay within the character’s historical background and the gestures of certain periods.
The way that I opened the door for the young people that come from where I come from and that have a different background, that is what I want to be remembered for.
To assert that it is possible to establish peace between men of different nations is simply to assert that man, whatever his ethnical background, his race, religious beliefs, or philosophy, is capable of reason.
Coming from a background of being onstage, you’re onstage for two and a half hours and you’re in it for the whole time no matter what you’re doing. Even if you don’t have a line, you have to stay in it.
Now learning a bit more about footballers I think what they need to do well, is someone who really wants to stay in the background and just be a strong support.
I read one or two other books which gave me a background in mathematics other than logic.
I actually don’t see that strong of a connection between my background as a rock ‘n roller and my early films. In a way I think your musical identity in film work is determined by the jobs that come your way.
Some songs are just going to be acoustic with just maybe some light background stuff going on and maybe violin or something like that. Or sax – I mean, I’m definitely having some sax. That’s just what I love. It’s going to be jazz-rock stuff. That’s what I’m aiming for.
I’m a filmmaker and I’m proud of the movies I’ve made. But in the background of my life I was also very involved in the creation of the sport.
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
I intend to be the president of all citizens of Macedonia, regardless of their ethnic or religious background, regardless of their political standing. I shall not allow ethnic hatred and intolerance to undermine Macedonia’s stability.
Music has its own emotional embodiment. It carries an emotion with it. When you associate a lyric with the music, it’s much easier; but when you’re standing there completely dry in front of the camera with no musical background, just a fine-tuned, get-this-emotional-story across, it’s a very, very intense kind of focus.
A lot of people think that there has to be extreme continuity in an album, but if you look at my background, it’s variety! I want to see some variety in an artist, I want to be entertained, I want some depth. Show me some different styles!
My brothers and I were raised by our parents to respect everyone regardless of background or race.
Imagine how foolish you’d look if, like one clever salesman who once pitched to me, you tried to license your product to a big industry player without knowing they just launched a competing product. With the right background research, he could have avoided that and other landmines – and so can you.
In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.
At 20 and 30, we are like travelers in a foreign country, reading the guide book to learn how to behave, to learn when the post office is open. Trivia looms important; critical issues fade into a pastel background, unrecognized.
I wouldn’t miss the fame. I don’t go out hunting for it. I try to avoid it and to slip into the background wherever I go.
I had come from an orchestral background, but I didn’t really have any orchestral pieces for film.
My background is Scottish.
Having been a venture-backed CEO, and having an established background in working with consumer-focused companies, I’ve built a strong network of entrepreneurs and people who can help startups.
It’s good for me to pull away from something that is just done for effect, which was basically Sue White in ‘Green Wing.’ In that, it was very much: if in trouble, gurn, or fall down. There was no character background to Sue. You didn’t know who she was. She didn’t have any toehold in any kind of reality.
My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true.
The fact that I have such a problem that people… that that has to, you know, be on people’s mind, what my personal background is. To me, to be very frank with you, is a totally irrelevant thing.
When I was younger, I was able to write with music playing in the background, but these days, I can’t. I find it distracting. Even when the music is just instrumental or has lyrics in a language I don’t understand, the clash between the voices in my head and the song can be very disorienting.
I know I’m as comfortable doing period as I am contemporary. I suppose we grow up with it in a sense, in the theater. We get to put on costumes and play a lot of period dramas or plays so we’re exposed to it a little bit more I think because of our theatrical background.
I’ve always played comedy. My background is musical comedy theatre, and that’s really where my training is.
I knew I’d just done one of the most amazing things that I will ever get a chance to do. Just to be part of a musical that’s not your background and to pull it off and to think that we’ve done something that’s really special.
In this movie they took them up in space. They’re floating around and doing zero gravity stuff. Well, they had to do it all on wires. All the wires had to be painted black against this black background. If you didn’t light it properly you could see the wires. Drove them crazy!
Before the arrival of the Credit Union, people who were from the poor background or a working class background couldn’t borrow from banks.
I come from a theatrical background, where, if you’re working on a movie or a play, you always respect the people you work with. You’re accommodating.
There are a lot of things you can do with a law degree background, but I just didn’t have a passion for it.
To be successful, you really have to put your ego in the background and try to be diplomatic to achieve what you want to achieve.
A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Your background and environment is with you for life. No question about that.
I have the same sense of the power and virtue of knowledge that some people get from a religious background.
I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
I guess that if I was a normal cartoonist who did things properly, I’d think up the background information first and then come up with the story. Saying that, you’d think that I don’t really think through anything.
Harassment is the background radiation of my life. It is a factor in every decision I make. Any time I tweet something or make a post, I’m always thinking about it.
But say some, would you expose woman to the contact of rough, rude, drinking, swearing, fighting men at the ballot box? What a humiliating confession lies in this plea for keeping woman in the background!
Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t draw on my undergraduate background in psychology.
My mom and dad put my brother and sister through university and they were very keen for us to have an academic background just to give us a chance.
We come from a tough, working class background, so we’re very tight.
I was never able to write seriously about heroes because I was very aware that I was not one and that in my background there was not this heroic thing.
My dad is from India, my mom is from Russia. Fortunately, we moved a lot. I went to a lot of different schools and completely different cultures, so that’s my background.
I always felt like the rug could be pulled out from under me at anytime. And coming from a racially mixed background, I always felt like I didn’t really fit in anywhere.
People think that I’m mean because I’m quiet, and I don’t really go out places or because I don’t really say too much. On the other hand, people think that I’m soft because I may not handle myself the way other people handle themselves. That’s just not me. They don’t know my background or none of that stuff.
There’s probably been very few people in comedy that have a diversified background as I do.
The fact was that I had always been considered a leader in my scholastic career. It just never dawned on me that this was any kind of preparation for the business world. Like most young women of my background and education, I always performed on demand and never anything else.
If you go back and look at the early promos for Gears 1, you’ll see just how different the characters were from the actual first game, both in appearance and background. And it’s an evolutionary process.
Well I had a musical background, but I still didn’t know a lot about drums at the time.
Sometimes I worked with just a background of a rock or a tree or black velvet, and just had to imagine the whole thing.
One of the major aspects of film composing is that it’s not so much a musical thing as it is communicating your ideas with the director, who often does not come from a musical background.
I didn’t come from a traditional Tory background; it was urban and metropolitan.
It was also my idea that the advisory committees of the Academy should replace the legal committees of the German Reichstag, which was gradually fading into the background in the Reich.
Initially, it was about kids at the bottom rung of the social ladder, due to their looks and their class background. But they’re also outsiders in terms of their peer group.
As you would expect, I come from a business background, and the idea that a finance director would be somewhat not working closely with the CEO of a company is very strange to anyone in the business world.
In real life I do a lot of reconnaissance and then kind of choose the guy I’m going to go after. Not like stalking, but I just want a little background info. That might be why I haven’t had many bad dates.
I come from a short fiction background, and my mom is a poet, so I’ve always read poetry; I’ve always had a lot of different influences both linguistically and musically.
But I would lie on the floor and analyze everything. I’d listen to all the strings and the background vocals on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and try to pick out the different instruments.
One day I was in Starbucks going through one of my books on accounting, and this beautiful young woman came up to me and said, ‘My accounting book is different from yours.’ Her name was Joyce, she had a background in finance and administration and ran a surgery center. Within a short time, we were married.
The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion or ethnic background, is that we all believe we are above-average drivers.
I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I’m coming from a jazz background.
History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns – gasp – describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.
I want to promote pastry. Pastry has always been in the background – it’s always cooking, cooking, cooking on programs, and pastry has just been this thing at the end. I want to show people what we do.
Your self-image is the result of all you have given your subconscious mind as a database, so regardless of your background, what you are willing to become is the only reality that counts.
Well, Mr. Speaker, if so many of these Iraqis are ready to come up and to provide the security, the police work in the country, then surely there should be no problem with putting American forces into the background instead of having them up front.
I wanna make my imprint in the game as far as music – hip-hop, and just music, period. ‘Cause I come from hip-hop, that’s my background, but I’m not gonna let that limit me from where I can go.
Background checks are an important part of keeping guns out of the wrong hands, but they are only as good as the information in the database.
I can’t stand recipes that don’t have background.
The original and very basic ‘Law & Order’ series has always seemed to me to be 100-percent exposition, with no filler, no pesky nuances and almost no background about the series’ continuing characters – just the hard nuts and bolts of pure storytelling.
I didn’t come from a background where I saw a lot of loving couples. All my aunts and uncles were either split up or fighting all the time. The only healthy relationships I saw were on TV.
This means I must pay close attention to the writing, but equally so to the scientific background – which sometimes means doing fairly involved calculations.
There should be a background check every time a firearm is transferred. You shouldn’t be able to go to a gun show and buy guns without a background check. There are Internet gun sales, classified ads in the newspapers – and you can buy guns without background checks.
You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.
For me personally, I have vitiligo, so my whole career, it’s always been this very odd debate: ‘Does she want to be white? Is she white and black? Is her mum white?’ It’s always been this question of my background, my race, and what I stand for.
When I was very young, my background as a Sikh-American made me aware of the tensions that underlie choice.
I like to stay within the context of the character’s background. If he’s a cop, I have to make sure the audience is convinced that this person, a cop, can do only so much without a gun.
These days when you say ‘videogame’, people think of immersive games that take over your life and require three thumbs to control. My goal is to create games that almost retreat into the background. I’m interested in bringing them back to their role as a social facilitator, the way party games help people to interact.
My background is in modern dance. I was a dancer and a choreographer before I was a director, and in dance, you can’t cheat. Your leg goes up in the air, or it doesn’t. So when I direct, I’m a big preparer.
I like to invest in companies where I can really add value from my experience, network, etc., so checking out my portfolio of other investments, and my background, will generally give some guidance there.
My mom is Jamaican and Chinese, and my dad is Polish and African-American, so I had a pretty diverse culinary background to work with.
Let’s start with the church. As you know, it’s my background, it’s a natural setting for me and it’s definitely my roots.
I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance – on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist’s response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on.
In many ways I’m similar to Barack Obama, who also has a strange name but was raised by a white American mother. His background is far more complicated than his name would suggest. Furthermore, the fact that I was a child during the hostage crisis has caused me to equate being Iranian with being alienated.
Any smart executive understands that to find the best talent she has to explore new territory that lies beyond familiar geography. That applies not only to gender, but also to race, religion, background and age.
Music is made to be listened to, so you immediately have an issue where you’re playing it in the background like wallpaper. Music doesn’t want to behave like that.
My background is more horror or thriller, and you can’t get better than horror fans, as far as I’m concerned.
My first album, ‘Get Lifted,’ was a hip-hop soul album that had some of its roots in the church, as far as the sonic choices, in the way that I sing and write songs. I have always had that as part of my background and part of my influence when I am making music.
Bergman has a very special eye for people. His background taught him to listen and to feel.
I think that the American people are curious about who a candidate is, what their background is, who their family is, what their faith experience has been, their education, their work experience. All of those are factors that voters look at because they want to take a measure of the individual.
I’ve always said that theater was where I began, so everything I do now has a bit of my theater background in it. It was my training.
I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist, but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
Thankfully, I have a background as an actor, and you learn how to live in that world of not knowing what’s going to happen next.
Well, my background is journalism. I don’t have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.
The message is clear: libraries matter. Their solid presence at the heart of our towns sends the proud signal that everyone – whoever they are, whatever their educational background, whatever their age or their needs – is welcome.
I don’t really have a theatre background at all.
My background is that I’ve spent a lot of time marketing entertainment. One of the old saws in package goods is you can take something that is popular and you can make it more popular. But if you take something less popular, you can’t automatically market it into the same success as something that’s already popular.
I’ll also tell you that five hundred thousand people will die this year of cancer. And I’ll also tell you that one in every four will be afflicted with this disease, and yet, somehow, we seem to have put it in a little bit of the background.
The conception of background music is changing. You use less and less of it these days.
It’s something that – jazz is one of the few things that you can go and listen to, I don’t care where you’re from, what you are, what background you come from – there’s something there for you.
