Top 99 Fred Quotes

I live in a wonderful world of make-believe. A world of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. A world of Winnie the Pooh and Edward Bear. Things like that. Wonderful things. Funny things.

The Fred Astaire movies made a huge impression on me.

From Fred Astaire I learned discipline and hard work.

I grew up with the movies of Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire and Judy Garland – these are the kinds of shows and the kinds of numbers in shows that I dreamed of being in and doing when I was a kid.

I grew up loving movie musicals and Idolizing Fred Astalre. I never worked with Fred but I met him once at a pool hall in Van Nuys.

I felt Michael Jackson was inspired a little bit more from the elegance of a Fred Astaire. Michael loved Sammy Davis, Jr. and James Brown and Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. But he wasn’t any of those people. To be inspired is one thing, but he made it all his own.

I’m definitely not as crazy as Fred!

In Buffalo, you can’t imagine how much people revere Fred Jackson because of his high character, his community involvement, coming from a Division III school.

I have talent crushes on Fred Armisen and Kyle Mooney.

I had two wonderful teachers: Sanford Melsner and Fred Kareman.

I would love to see a real story about Fred Hampton.

I wish I was born in that era: dancing with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, going to work at the studio dressed in beautiful pants, head scarves, and sunglasses.

Fred Astaire was a more formal, trained dancer who loved waltzing and only danced with the girls.

I don’t expect to win every battle but I think Fred Pierce has enough respect for me that I can go fight my battles and win my share.

Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.

You can compare Fred and Barney Rubble with Gleason and Carney.

Fred Hoyle was one of the first scientists to become famous on television and radio. It was because he told a dramatic story about the universe – about how amazing it is and the extraordinary discoveries that astronomers like him were making.

I have always been Fred Durst and I’ve always been me.

I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business, so that’s literally 70 years.

The concept of the characters in animal skins and us satirizing modern technology made it fun. But the voices we cast and the characterization of Fred Flintstone had a lot to do with it.

I remember vividly seeing ‘Tarzan’ and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.

Fred Astaire was my dream dancer.

Whether it’s Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire or ‘West Side Story,’ see it on the big screen. That’s the way we should appreciate it.

It was an old cricket coach who started calling me Fred – as in Flintstone. There are far worse things to be called in the dressing room.

Fred Thompson was a law partner of mine.

His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television.

I’m just really proud of ‘Dead Head Fred.’

Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor – those were my idols. All I ever wanted to be was a motion picture song-and-dance man. I kind of fell into other things. Did walk-ons and bits for years and worked in little theater at night.

I’m really influenced by Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.

In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.

My father danced a lot. He was called ‘the French Fred Astaire.’

The only thing that frightens me a little is when I’m called Kevin rather than Fred, but that’s how people have known me for so many years. So, I can’t really blame them.

Whenever you play against Fred – we certainly did it – you let him get it because he has to take three or four touches. He doesn’t know how to do one or two touches. Anyone that watches his game, he gets it facing the wrong way, turns, turns, chops, chops and he’ll give you the ball three or four times a game.

No one around me was obsessed with Fred Astaire except for me. It just snowballed, really. I started with tap lessons. When I didn’t have tap shoes, I taped nickels on the bottom of my penny loafers.

I try not to repeat myself too often, but it’s a gamble. ‘Fred Claus’ had three Oscar winners in it. No business – it was a bad movie.

My dad got into this group, Commission, with Fred Hammond, and that was my biggest gospel memory. I would hear that all the time, and listening to their voices helped me develop my voice because I would try to emulate them as a kid. It taught me tone, and it gave me a balance.

In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what’s inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.

I started dancing when I saw Fred Astaire in ‘Flying Down to Rio,’ at approximately nine years old. Fred Astaire influenced me, more than anything, to be in ‘show business.’

I was first exposed to the idea of macro-molecular sequences while I was a postdoctoral fellow with Jack Strominger at Harvard. During that time, I briefly visited Fred Sanger’s laboratory in Cambridge, England, to learn the methodology of RNA fingerprinting and sequencing.

I have a photograph at home of Fred Astaire from the knees down with his feet crossed. It’s kind of inspiring because it reminds me his feet were bleeding at the end of rehearsals. Yet when you watch him, all you see is freedom. It’s a reminder of what the job is about in general, not just being in musicals.

Fred Durst gave my first wife a tattoo of a star on the bottom of her foot when she was 14 years old in his trailer home. So that was my first introduction to Limp Bizkit.

My mom always had me and my brother watching old Fred Astaire movies.

I acted three times with Fred MacMurray, three times with Martin and Lewis, four times with Rock Hudson. Three times with Glenn Ford.

He was a wonderful gentleman, elegant, with great humility. All the wonderful things you can say about a person, you have to say about Fred Astaire.

The savage repression of blacks, which can be estimated by reading the obituary columns of the nation’s dailies, Fred Hampton, etc., has not failed to register on the black inmates.

After marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as a young man, John Lewis went on to become a legendary leader for civil rights alongside other giants of the movement like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

I’ve worked with people from Fred Zinnemann, John Huston, through to Richard Fleischer, all of those boys from Hollywood and so on, and Sam Peckinpah and then the Mike Radfords.

As a dancer, obviously, we are all inspired by Michael Jackson, and I always looked up to Gene Kelly. He was a bigger version of Fred Astaire, and he was amazing as well.

I have a ton of respect for Fred Van Vleet.

I dug up my dad’s old Fred Astaire tapes, and now I find him super-inspiring. He’s, like, one of the best dancers.

Astaire was ballroom, basically, and Gene Kelly had such athleticism – that’s always what I responded to and what just blew my head open when I watched Gene Kelly’s numbers. But, Fred Astaire was just so incredibly inventive and so, so smooth – so smooth.

For tech, I like the ‘DailySearchCast’, ‘TWiT’ and anything Veronica Belmont does on CNET. I think Perez Hilton is a riot, and the rest of my consumption is by people: Folks like Dave Winer, Fred Wilson, Mark Cuban, Brian Alvey, Jeff Jarvis, Xeni Jardin, etc.

Sadly, I do my homework. I’ve a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I’ll read C. Fred Bergsten’s defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It’s embarrassing to admit.

I think the worst thing you could ever do is label comedy. I’m a fan of the broadness of Lucille Ball, the subtlety of Peter Sellers and the oddballness of Fred Armisen and the wittiness of Marty Short. I’m a fan of all of it, and I want to do all of it.

Unlike Fred and Paddy, I don’t get many offers of work other than ‘Top Gear,’ because I’m crap at everything else.

A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service: The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.

What Fred Lebow went through was an inspiration for me. You have to set goals for yourself.

For all Trump’s criticisms of government, his family wealth came from feeding at the government trough. His father, Fred Trump, leveraged government housing programs into a construction business; the empire was founded on public money.

Fred Astaire never let you see him sweat, but he sweetened his deceptively casual virtuosity with just enough charm to make it irresistible.

I had heard Ornette a couple of times, but I didn’t really know where he was coming from until we started the record and it was beautiful, Fred. It opened up my mind.

If you didn’t know Fred Claire, you didn’t know anyone.

I’ve worked with Fred Upton, and I think we’ve got a lot of common agreement on energy production.

It used to be my ambition to emulate Fred Astaire on the stage and in motion picture musicals.

Fred Astaire is my real idol.

I studied dancing for 13 years. And loved to dance. Always wanted to dance with Fred Astaire.

No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.

When I was in Buffalo, Fred Jackson was you know, I would say he was a big mentor of mine and when I was in Miami, I probably picked apart Brian Hartline, Davone Bess, those guys.

I know great songwriters. Fred Neil would come up when he was in L.A., we all used to hang out. He would sit there and sing, and we would just melt. I mean, we would go to his recording sessions.

I always feel the most validated and confident being around people that I find funny – having Fred Armisen laugh at a scene or Bill Hader or Seth Meyers give me a compliment.

I loved ‘Cabaret.’ I loved what it had to say and the whole style and brilliance of the book. It was my first time performing Fred Ebb and John Kander’s work. They took risks. Even when their shows are fun and funny, they are about very serious issues.

Well, my sister played trumpet. Can you imagine having a sister blowing the trumpet around the house, Fred? And my brother, he played piano. Everybody was playing some kind of music, so it was natural for me to get into it.

I love the old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies; they’re so beautiful to look at. It’s such a shame we don’t make them anymore. Although, I don’t know how you could make tap dancing current and topical.

I was sent there by the Free Congress Committee, headed by Paul Weyrich. Fred Smith and I were sent down as observers, with reporters’ credentials, so we could witness the events.

My uncle, who was a little more flamboyant, always said the guy who dressed the best was Fred Astaire.

I remember as a young man seeing these bigger-than-life, strong images of black manhood in the form of Jim Brown and Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly, Billy Dee Williams. All these guys were these alpha males who were smart, attractive. I said, ‘Wow, I want to be like that.’

The thing is that my idols have always been the types of guys who could do anything: Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Sinatra, Dean Martin; and when you look up to people like that, you don’t accept that you need to be compartmentalised.

I was very laced with drugs myself, but Fred seemed to be even more so than me. That might have had something to do with it. That might have had something to do with nobody wanting to play my records, too, I don’t know.

I did a dance with Fred Astaire in the movie ‘Bandwagon.’ I got to waltz just from left of camera to right of camera, and I’m taller than Fred Astaire. Fortunately, I was wearing a long skirt, so I waltzed with bended knees.

When I was a kid, I loved Nicholas brothers films. It was like skateboarding. Even Gene Kelly: I always preferred him to Fred Astaire, just because he was more athletic, like skateboarding.

I’m really into Noel Gallagher’s lad culture vibe. I used to wear Fred Perry polo shirts a lot. In fact, I went to an Oasis concert, which I believe was the band’s penultimate gig before they disbanded, and I would say about 80 per cent of the audience were wearing the same polo.

Fred Willard still makes me laugh.

I met fred rogers in 1998, when ‘Esquire’ assigned me a story about him for a special issue on American heroes. I last spoke with him on Christmas Day 2002, when I called him to talk about an argument I’d had with my cousin; he died two months later, on February 27, 2003.

I want to have a very definite style that people recognise as being ‘Fred Fox.’

I hear that 5 o’clock whistle in my mind like Fred Flintstone and I have to stop. I’m also not much of a morning writer. I have a sweet spot from about 11am to 4pm. But I really work during that time.

Ultimately, I’d say a lot of my vocal influences are jazz-based, people like Ella Fitzgerald, or Fred Astaire.

Freddie Mercury and I both loved to have a laugh on tour. If there were shenanigans and good times, Fred and I would be there.

I make up cassettes all the time – to take on the road with me – a song from this album, a song from that album. That’s the way I listen to music; it’s like one of those K Tel things: it’s from all over. I listen to Fred Astaire, I listen to African folk music, I listen to Talking Heads.

Fred Astaire was special, and such a marvelous human being.

Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.

The first thing I did was ‘Ziegfeld Follies,’ a small bit en pointe with Fred Astaire.

I decided I wanted to go to Cambridge, and then I got introduced to Fred Sanger. I was very conscientious, and I asked him when I first got there if I should start reading up on things. But he said, ‘No, I think you can just start these experiments,’ so I plunged right in.

I think if I was like Fred Astaire out there or like break dance fighting and doing crazy splits and stuff like that I think people would be like, ‘ehhhh, I’m just going to watch him,’ but the fact that they’re like, ‘I can do that,’ it’s fun and I think they lose themselves.

I was a mod when I was a kid. I’d be in Italian pencil-leg trousers with those bowling shoes you wear outside and a Fred Perry polo shirt with a V-neck sweater. It was like an Essex uniform – a very specific look.

I can sing as well as Fred Astaire can act.

Certainly, I’ve loved musicals for a while, so I did some short films in college that had musical numbers and things like that, so I’ve kind of been obsessed with Fred and Ginger and Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen and Jaques Demy forever.

My grandmother introduced me to musicals and Fred Astaire and Cary Grant and all the American comedies and classics.

Mr Fosse was obviously influenced by Brecht and Weill, as well as Bergman and Fellini, and you could see the influence of vaudeville and African American hoofing – and Fred Astaire, too.

Fred Segal was founded – by none other than Fred Segal – as a tiny jeans retailer in 1968. In the 1970s Segal, began selling space to employees, starting with his nephew Ron Herman.

I would love to do a Fred Astaire/Gene Kelly type movie musical – a fun, song and dance, romantic comedy. Or, even just play the lead in one of those broad comedies – that would just be fantastic.