Hoops Quotes

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies. We were all encouraged to believe that the classics of the theater were the fiery hoops through which you`d have to pass if you were going to have any self-esteem as a performer. It never occurred to me that that was the case. One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible. England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter. The great tradition of liberalism in England is essentially a sponge that absorbs all possibility of change. America looked different to me: the idea of America as a place of infinite possibilities was defined for me through the movies. I`m glad I did the classical work that I did, but it just wasn`t for me. I`m a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that`s the most obvious.

(On his Titanic (1997) experience): Yeah, I was lucky because I didn`t have to spend hours in freezing water. There weren`t many people my age on set, so Kate (Kate Winslet), Leo (Leonardo DiCaprio) and I hung out together. We would pile into Leo`s dressing room, which was full of PlayStations, mini basketball hoops and the like.

I like to play golf. I like to shoot hoops.

I don`t want to jump through hoops for people.

There is money for the west sewer plant. The key point is that everything is on target for us to meet the Oct. 4 predicted date to award a contract to construct the west plant. There`s a whole series of hoops that we have to jump through and yesterday was one of that series. We`ve cleared that hoop and we`re still on target.

And, ... I always say, `Why do you have to wear hula hoops in your ears?`

I`m very pro-environment, but let`s figure out how to do it better and not jump through a dozen hoops to achieve what is obvious in the first place. There should be a categorical exclusion (for Falcon) just like airplanes that use non-toxic propellants. That would be a huge improvement,

We didn`t execute down the stretch when we needed to get hoops. We didn`t have enough offensive potency.

Even if you only counted the votes that actually made it through the hoops in order to be cast, the president was really Al Gore.

And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.

Our Founding Fathers would shudder to see how easily forces outside the mainstream now seem to effortlessly push some Senate leaders toward conduct the American people don`t want from their elected leaders: Abusing power. Inserting the government into our private lives. Injecting religion into debates about public policy. Jumping through hoops to ingratiate themselves to their party's base, while step by step, day by day, real problems that keep American families up at night fall by the wayside here in Washington.