The ebulliently sharp mind of 'White Christmas' director Walter Bobbie made me tremble and strive in the same breath. The deceptively 'simple' dialogue of David Ives, asking every actor to just. say. it. Float it on the breeze; it doesn't need 'explanation,' just energy and truth.
— David Ogden Stiers
I think the preservation of orchestras and what they do is worth expending all the ways there are to reach out to people who might not otherwise go.
Cogsworth, the character I did on 'Beauty and the Beast,' could be a bit flamboyant onscreen, because basically, he is a cartoon. But they didn't want Cogsworth to become Disney's gay character, because it got around a gay man was playing him.
It's really important to stay engaged and involved in the character.
There are a couple of roles I haven't played that I want to. I would love to play Shiloh.
I had a meeting in LA in which they took a really overstuffed hour and a half. It was as close to old Hollywood as I remembered it in the last 20 years.
Very often when I go in to meet for movies or pilots, I'm put on videotape. I hate the notion that that tape is going to sit on a shelf and never get better.
You hear the same work by different orchestras, different conductors, violinists, pianists, singers, and slowly, the work reveals itself and begins to live deeper in you.
Something happens to us all when we experience something as a unit that doesn't occur when we're on our couches or holding our little portable DVD players.
I will never master this craft. Orchestras are very, very forthcoming with me.
I'd forgotten I'd done the anime called Spirited Away, the English version of a Japanese film.
A lot affects the outcome. It boils down to scheduling and the commitment of the network.
People ordinarily don't think of their orchestras as important as we'd like them to be. People don't care about their friends and neighbors who sit down to commit excellence three or four times a year, but they will go see the tall bald guy with three names from television.
Fun can happen on the interior. Nobody knows about it, but there are fireworks going on inside your spirit when you hear a great orchestra playing great music.
A lot of my income has been derived from voicing Disney and family programming.
Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten.
Writing is hard work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.
I am not a long-run actor. I admire actors who can do that.
I am certainly not a mainstream religious man.
What we have to get clear to kids is that when you offer your stillness and open yourself to the experience of music, it pays you back more than you give.
I love pulling people into concert halls who might not otherwise go and getting their ears tuned.
High school music teachers... nobody makes a living off it.
My father, who died a few years ago, was a good, simple, very honest man. His faith and affection for his family was just unassailable, without question.
In television you go in with this operating system that it is a crapshoot.
The simple act of sitting down and playing something enormously complex and spiritually uplifting on a harpsichord just bores kids to tears. There's no sizzle, there's no grab. But it's the great lesson of serious music, that it invites you to listen, rather than demands that you listen.
I wish to spend my life's twilight being just who I am. I could claim noble reasons as coming out in order to move gay rights forward, but I must admit it is for far more selfish reasons. Now is the time I wish to find someone, and I do not desire to force any potential partner to live a life of extreme discretion with me.
When something really extreme happens, you have to find a way to embrace that and include it in how you think about the character. Sometimes it's not easy.
I've played Lear three times, I would love to do it again.
It's rare to be treated like a friend you haven't met in a Hollywood meeting.
Every time I hear, Cut. Print, something cold and electrical goes off in my head, because I'm never going to change that film.
We lament the speed of our society and the lack of depth and the nature of disposable information.
Kids now are so used to surround sound and the power in theater speakers, that the concert hall is a disappointment to them.
Because I don't take money, I'll go anywhere and do a benefit concert with almost any orchestra.
Very often, I don't make it through moments of recording because it is genuinely funny and absolutely ridiculous that a 60-year-old grown man is making these noises.
If it's right and true, it's listened to and accommodated.
People are nice enough, but you can hear the giant tick of the second hand. People are so harried.
