The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
I took a few months off after my senior year was over, and I prayed and tried to figure out what was my plan and my purpose. That’s how I started writing songs and playing guitar just to get my feelings out.
I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that, I thought golf writers got up every morning, played a round of golf, had lunch, showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner.
I love beautiful things; I like having nice clothes, and I can appreciate why other people do – but I’ve also started to learn more about the impact of what we buy: how things are made, how much you buy and the quality of everything.
Living in a capital in Europe but still surrounded by mountains and ocean, my relationship to music was strongest walking to school and back. I would sing to myself and very quickly started mapping out my melodies to landscapes – at the time I just thought it was very matter of fact, a common thing to do.
I’m always having a crisis of faith, with everything. People who are certain are terrifying to me. That’s how religious wars get started.
I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings… At a certain point, I decided I didn’t want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.
Every designer needs a story. Mine is all about glamour because my family has been in the business of glamour for three generations. My grandfather Shamshuddin Khan started his embroidery and fabric-making business in the 1930s.
Since I started driving in F1 in 2006-07, the cars have got slower and easier to drive.
At the start of my two years at Juventus, I had big plans for the club, but it turned out that the Intertoto Cup was the only medal in my desk drawer when finally they told me to pack my bags. We started the first season really well, and Conte was so important for me.
So when I started writing my own stuff, it was with a lot of combinations and time changes and power.
I started out real young as a tight end, but I was never getting the football. I knew when I played basketball, I loved to have control of the ball. When I played baseball, I was a pitcher. I always wanted to be the guy throwing the passes and making a difference, I guess.
Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading.
Abraham was extremely wealthy and he had a covenant with God. It’s not the Jewish blessing, it’s the Abrahamic blessing. I get excited talking about it ’cause I love it and I started out deep in debt with nothing. I had to learn this from the Bible and from my spiritual mentor Oral Roberts.
When I started out in life I wanted to teach.
I used to work on Blackpool Pleasure Beach when I started wrestling.
I can’t remember why or how I started writing, but I think it was always a way of making sense of the world.
It was wrong to capture wild animals and confine them in captivity for people to go and gawk at them. And that’s basically how zoos got started. But once you do that, and once you have animals that have been bred in captivity, you’re really stuck with them in some sense. You can’t return them to the wild.
I read that all dogs have wolf DNA in them, which seemed preposterous because my dog, Tucker, is… afraid of plastic bags blowing in the wind. I thought, ‘How can Tucker have wolf in him? How can this be?’ So I started researching it.
I haven’t done much rereading or rewatching stuff I’ve written over the years, but I did look at ‘Misery’ before I started the play. I liked it. Not much I would change.
It all started when my dog began getting free roll over minutes.
I’ve actually started a number of businesses in my career. So I’m 28 currently, but when I was about 16, I started building Websites, and that’s how I put myself through school. I went to Duke with a degree in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering, and then to Princeton.
For me, seeing the progression of video games and consoles – whether it be PlayStation, Xbox, or whatever – I think just seeing how good they’ve gotten from the days when I first started playing is just amazing.
During my training, we had monthly assessments. It was my first time doing makeup by myself, and I did not even know how to draw on the eyebrows. Since then, I started to look for makeup related videos on YouTube and naturally became more interested.
I’ll keep working as long as I live because singing has taken on the feeling of joy that I had when I started, when my only responsibility was to sing well.
I occasionally rapped along to some homegrown Korean rap. And then a friend introduced me to Wu-Tang and played me ‘Enter the 36th Chambers.’ It was very shocking. And then I started to look for different albums. This was pre-Internet, so it’s hard to find the music, and it was even harder to find music videos.
My parents own a restaurant in downtown Oakland – Garden House – and I started working there at 8. I’d work the cash register while people looked at me skeptically. Free child labor!
Then I started to do furniture and interiors for a friend and just to get stuff in a magazine, and then slowly started to build up and started to doing exhibitions.
I’ve been doing my record label for 15 years called Dim Mak. I started my label when I was 19 in ’96. I started putting out an eclectic roster of artists. In 2003, we found a band called Bloc Party, and in 2004, we started getting remixes for Bloc Party, and at the same time I was throwing Dim Mak parties in Los Angeles.
If you are going to make a change, make it big and bold. Walk up to the biggest guy on the block, stand in his face and get it started. Then go around, brigade by brigade, making it make sense.
I remember Glenn Miller coming to me once, before he had his own band, saying, How do you do it? How do you get started? It’s so difficult. I told him, I don’t know but whatever you do don’t stop. Just keep on going.
Just going to Africa is amazing; it all comes back to the motherland. It’s pretty much where everything started.
I’m a DJ. I get the party started.
Folk music is music that everyday people can play, and it inspired a lot of people to make their own music. That trailed into making your own pop music, and that’s why garage bands started springing up everywhere.
Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else’s hands.
I’m not on any social media. I know people who have met on Twitter and through Facebook. I had a friend, someone liked her photos on Instagram, and they started direct messaging each other and went out on a date! That’s so foreign to me.
My tenure at ‘The Daily Show’ started during the decade after September 11, and fear of Muslims was at an all-time high. Politicians and the media seemed to dial the fright, mistrust, and animosity up to a fever pitch to gain votes and ratings.
At Berkeley, you wore a hoodie and pajamas and Birkenstocks, and that’s swag. I was so thrown off. What I thought was cool wasn’t cool no more, so I thought about what I actually liked. I started experimenting. I started wearing Birkenstocks. I wanted to dive into the culture.
Going into the Navy was the best decision I ever made in my life because it completely transformed that scared boy who didn’t have any dreams to someone who started to believe in himself.
When I started DJing, because everyone called me ‘Snake’ in my city first, I was like, ‘DJ Snake – OK, let’s go for it.’ The name sucks, but it’s too late now.
I was looking to explore the theme of good and evil, so what better inspiration than the comics? I’d developed a relationship with DC and Warner Bros. when I donated a sculpture of Catwoman to the ‘We Can Be Heroes’ campaign a few years ago. That’s what started it.
I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
When I was 13, before I got in high school, I was writing mad raps. I didn’t really know if it was good or not, so for a year, I just held them. When I got in high school, I started spittin’ bars.
There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
When I started out, everyone seemed to be adopting these names… Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious. I wasn’t really Rotten or Vicious or Nasty, so I wanted something a bit more funny – yet something that seemed real rock ‘n’ roll… something that acknowledged my ambition.
I have a great love for nature. That must have started somewhere down back home, I think, because my family own one of the better known gardens in Soochow, so I played there, and I lived there, and so I must have absorbed something there. So I continue to have a great interest in nature.
In black neighborhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for the jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons.
