listening

My dad was a big Frank Zappa fan, so I remember listening to a lot of Frank Zappa. Girls do not like Frank Zappa.

My dad was always playing music. Not, like, playing music but listening to music.

When I was younger, I was listening to a lot of Armenian music, you know, revolutionary music about freedom and protest. In the 70s I was listening to soul and the Bee Gees and ABBA, and funk.

It is more important that we listen to others than to always be speaking, for in that way we learn what there is to know. We should be easy to talk to, and grateful for new information.

A majority of American citizens are now becoming skeptical of the claim that our carbon footprints, resulting from our use of fossil fuels, are going to lead to climatic calamities. But governments are not yet listening to the citizens.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right.

Listeners are kind of ambushed... if a poem just happens to be said when they're listening to the radio. The listener doesn't have time to deploy what I call their 'poetry deflector shields' that were installed in high school - there's little time to resist the poem.

I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.

Human beings love poetry. They don't even know it sometimes... whether they're the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber... they're listening to poetry.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

In improv, the whole thing is that it is a relationship between the two people, as a back and forth. In standup, you don't really want to be listening to what somebody is saying; you want to project your jokes into their face. And that's really not a good instinct with a 'Daily Show' field piece, where it's supposed to be an interview.

My relationship with God has gotten so much stronger. He's always had his hand on me. He always guided me. I didn't always go where he wanted me to go. But He always had me. Now that I'm actually listening and being obedient, life is so much better.

I grew up listening to show tunes in the back of the car.

I get labelled as just being about one thing, but there's lots of layers to what I do. It's just lazy journalism, but people start to accept it. If people spent an hour in my car driving around London and listening to the stuff I listen to, they'd hear some interesting stuff.

There is as much wisdom in listening as there is in speaking - and that goes for all relationships, not just romantic ones.

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.

I probably wouldn't be singing if not for Michael Jackson. When I started singing, I didn't like my tone until my mom put me on to Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, so listening to the way they used their instrument helped me get more comfortable with my own.

My mom is awesome. She's really young. My mom is 40, and she raised me listening to Nirvana and Courtney Love and Coldplay, Gin Blossoms, The Cranberries, and stuff. Like, my early, early memories are of being a little kid running around in floral skirts and Doc Martens when I was, like, three.