All my friends started getting boyfriends, but I didn’t want a boyfriend, I wanted a thirteen-colour biro.
My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I’d crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.
My first movie was this independent that I did on the Erie Canal in 1995, called Erie, that I don’t know if you could even get, actually with Felicity Huffman. And then from that I did this film that was eventually called The Broken Giant later that fall. And then I kind of started getting into doing pilots.
I’ve got a little arthritis that I have to deal with. I was 6 feet 7 when I started, and I’ve shrunk up a little bit. I’m probably 6-5 or so now. But up here at 82, I feel pretty good. I’m sticking in there.
Coy Wire played in the NFL for 9 years and is now a motivational speaker and has a book out called ‘Change Your Mind.’ He is an amazing person with such positive energy! When Kroy and I first met and started dating, there weren’t a whole lot of people that supported us, but Coy always did.
Once I started ‘Nagaram Nidrapotunna Vela’ I had to finish it. I made a wrong decision. I knew the film would be a flop and told the producer so. Everyone failed – director, producer and all.
I started working at Focus on the Family doing debates and media and cultural studies.
Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic? People don’t believe me when I tell them. That’s how I saw myself, in comedy.
People always say, ‘Oh, I’d love to work with my sibling,’ or ‘My God, I could never work with my sibling.’ It was just a natural process for us. We started collaborating on our first films and it evolved. We have a passion for film that we shared as we were growing up.
I started doing ’30 Rock’ and started writing ‘Mystery Team’ at the beginning of that. While I was doing ‘Mystery Team,’ I started practicing stand-up. While I was doing stand up, I got ‘Community.’ It’s like I planted trees six years ago, and now they have fruit.
When I started out, there was so much work that I couldn’t think of doing anything else. I would go for recordings by 8.30 A.M., that, too, in trains. I used to come home at night. I was travelling alone everywhere.
I started my career in parent education with the idea that we needed to let our kids go. I believed that parents were suffocating for their children. There was no room for individuality and personhood.
Since my childhood I always knew that India was a land of scarcity but this has changed ever since the BJP started ruling our country.
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people’s backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
GIS started on mainframe computers; we could get one map every five to 10 hours, and if we made a mistake, it could take longer. In the early ’90s, when people started buying PCs, we migrated to desktop software.
I remember when I started off, my first car was a Kia Spectra. With a spoiler kit and some rims.
I was on the Mekong River between the border of Thailand and Laos. I was there to find the elusive Mekong giant catfish but the border police were suspicious. Along with my film, they confiscated my passport and started making accusations about my political allegiances.
I was a regular on ‘Holby City,’ and I did daytime; that’s how I started off. Off in Hong Kong doing stuntman stuff, then coming back to England doing daytime soap operas.
I’m sick of having an opinion on everything. Getting older, you learn all sorts of things you’re supposed to, but I feel like it’s time, when you get older, through experience, to… I started to feel quite… what’s the word? … intimidated by seeing both sides of everything.
I started working at a time when most of my friends were still figuring their lives out.
It’s funny how life works. You end up sometimes back where you started.
I always love going home anyway; it’s where my roots are. I always like to go back. It’s a good reminder of where I started and the journey that I still have to go on to get where I want to be.
I try to search for roles where the character is not dependent on how she looks, but it is hard because I didn’t know anyone in this industry, so I started as an extra and fought.
My mother told me once that she had her talk with God whenever she started a new sweater: ‘Please don’t take me in the middle of the sweater.’ And as soon as she finished knitting a sweater, and it was blocked and put together, she already had the wool to start the next sweater so that nothing bad would happen.
The moment I understood this – that my Parkinson’s was the one thing I wasn’t going to change – I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.
I became a good pitcher when I stopped trying to make them miss the ball and started trying to make them hit it.
When I started my engineering, I had to support my education expenses; I was then studying in what is now the National Institute of Technology in Srinagar.
My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the hell she is.
Before WeWork, I had a baby clothing company. When I started out, I had no real contacts in the garment business and no mentor to guide me on how things worked. I just had an idea to put pads on the baby clothes on to protect the baby’s knees.
It was many years ago when I started shooting and I took it up as a complete hobby and a pastime.
I started playing piano; I picked up a ukulele, and I loved it and kept playing that. I play a bit of guitar, and some African drums from back in the day.
I started to let go and seeing that there are no rules.
The reason we started the Driver Era is just ’cause our creative endeavors sort of demanded it.
It started back in 2002, when there was hardly any reality television. ‘Survivor’ had just started. My hope and dream was that ‘The Bachelor’ would last one or two nights on network TV, so I might meet somebody in the network and then I could get a real job.
When I got to high school, they had a morning TV show you could become a part of, and I started making short films for that, most little satirical, laugh-y films about the dean of students being chased by a dinosaur or something like that. And I really just enjoyed it.
I felt like I was a bit more respected when I started to paint. It was like revealing my diary, but in a different language. It was something that was mysterious about me.
It’s funny – almost every comedian that I started out with moved to L.A., except for my two friends Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer. And my two friends that are doing the best in comedy, the most successful friends I have, are Hannibal Buress and Amy Schumer.
I just lived it and did my own thing without looking over my shoulder. I think I’m very lucky, considering when I started everything, and the fact that I have a masters in music, and I’ve always worked in music, and that’s what I wanted to do.
Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I’d listen to Italian music.
I was one of those kids who thought I could be the president of England when I grew up if I wanted to. Then I started acting and realized life is hard, and people are mean. And there’s no president of England, and I’m not British.
I started at the bottom and worked my way up. I think that shows hard work pays off. A good thing takes a while.
I started modeling when I was 11 years old and acting when I was 12.
I started on the drums when I was eight.
When I got into the second half of ‘Dragon Ball,’ I had already become more interested in thinking up the story then in drawing the pictures. Then I started to not place much emphasis on the pictures.
I started keeping track of my pet peeves and so far have counted over 160… but to pick one: muffins. They’re imposters. They think they’re breakfast food, but really, they are just terrible cupcakes.
I really started from grassroots, without a handout or anything.
The family is very important. They make me feel good always because if I won, when I started to be famous, the relationship never changed with my friends and family.
Years ago, when I first started being a big star, I had fans that were fanatical. It was when ‘Jolene’ was a big hit.
I’m not a real movie star. I’ve still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.
The closest I ever came to getting married was just before I started singing. In fact, my first record saved my neck.
At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.
Well, Grover Washington was my main influence and when I went to college, I started listening to more of the jazz masters like Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane.
In my professional life, when I started I felt it was very transitory. You meet people, you have to make this very intense connection and then you might not see them for two years. It was kind of odd and when I started out I didn’t like it.
