Making words rhyme for a living is one of the great joys of my life… That’s a superpower I’ve been very conscious of developing. I started at the same level as everybody else, and then I just listened to more music and talked to myself until it was an actual superpower I could pull out on special occasions.
I shaved my head about 15 years ago and the first time I shaved it, I started running my hand through my hair and it was very therapeutic.
I was shocked and thrilled when I started getting messages and calls from people I look up to in the industry.
Over most of history, threats have come from nature – disease, earthquakes, floods, and so forth. But the worst now come from us. We’ve entered a geological era called the anthropocene. This started, perhaps, with the invention of thermonuclear weapons.
Denzel Washington is a big Hollywood movie star now. But he started out as an actor in the Negro Ensemble company.
When I heard ‘Moon River’, at first I thought it was just a nice song, but then I started paying attention to the words and realized this song was about Huck Finn. I just love the words, that it’s kind of you and me against the world, and we’re going to make it together.
There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.
‘It’s Everyday Bro’ started with me talking about the things I do on a day-to-day basis. From there, the creativity was unleashed, and the song was the result.
Partying and having all of those pictures taken distracts from the work that I do. It’s not why I started acting. I didn’t get into acting to be written about. It kind of just happened – so I accept that it’s my life.
They were tough times and I started working when I was 10 years old, delivering papers and eventually becoming a waiter.
I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did.
I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse.
Football was always my dream. I started playing at the age of five, and I’m still playing now.
I had a great job, living a great lifestyle… and just started doing the wrong things, getting a little bit cocky.
After my primary school education, I started gathering little children by visiting parents to ask if they wanted somebody to care for their kids by teaching them the Bible. I have never attended any seminary school or Bible college in my life.
We started Fox when everyone said it couldn’t be done.
I started with shoes, and with hard work and discipline, the business prospered.
Before I started a company, I was an employee with a bad attitude. I was always felt like, bosses are stupid, and people weren’t well treated.
I started this job in 1995, and I felt the same pressure in my first day, with my first team, Reggiana, in the Second Division, as I feel now. Nothing has changed, but what changes are the number of games, especially for top teams. For this reason, the work has pressure. But only this.
I would say I was, I guess, a toddler when I actually found my passion because, when I was little, I used to mimic all these movies and sing all this music that you wouldn’t think a toddler would know. I would think my passion just started there, and it just grew with me.
I was who I was in high school in accordance with the rules of conduct for a normal person, like obeying your mom and dad. Then I got out of high school and moved out of the house, and I just started, for lack of a better term, running free.
I never made a damn dime until I started doing what I wanted.
Ricky Washington is from a Baptist church in Miami, Florida, and he can pretty much sing anything. We just started working it up at soundcheck, and holy smokes, it’s just great! The audience gets to singing. So there’s that stuff to do – find some old obscure R&B stuff – because we can do it justice.
Don’t get me started about the media double standard.
An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.
Before the Beatles, America was musically a very conservative country. You can see film footage of people at a baseball game, they all had hats and ties on, and the women were dressed up like they were going to church. That was the America that I started getting interested in musically.
I started doing comedy because that was the only stage that I could find. It was the pure idea of being on stage. That was the only thing that interested me, along with learning the craft and working, and just being in productions with people.
Life started getting good when I started making money.
My major influences were primarily guitar players and bands; I started playing bass by accident.
I come from a very musical family. My dad taught me to play guitar. I play violin and drums as well. Violin, I started in elementary school. Drums actually came when I was in a program called ‘Rock Star,’ which was really awesome. We were doing a song by the Ramones, so I thought, ‘Why not play the drums?’
As a New Yorker you can’t help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.
My background did not start with the East Side; it started with Greenwich Village, which is West Side.
When it comes to electronic music, I started listening to a lot of Daft Punk, way before I knew what house music was, and then progressed into a lot of Steve Angello, Eric Prydz, Axwell, Sebastian Ingrosso, and Laidback Luke.
When I was nine or ten, I had a chat with my coach and I asked if I could play in goal. I started playing as a goalkeeper and it was love at first sight. Only a goalkeeper knows how it is.
When I was 10 or 11 people started saying there was something special about my voice. But when I was 15 or 16 is when I really thought my hobby could become my career.
My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: ‘Writers write because they weren’t invited to a party.’ That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.
My oldest son started to like ‘South Park’ and ‘Family Guy,’ so we’d watch together so I could spend time with him.
I went to Willoughby Girls High, I finished my high school certificate and then I did shorthand and typing the next year. Then started travelling and never used it since.
I started in junior high doing the splits and flips and that kind of stuff. It was kind of the acceptable thing to do. But I had two older brothers, so I was a tomboy. I was the cute tomboy who could put on the skirt but then go tackle you or something. I was a little rough around the edges for a pretty woman!
It’s only by coincidence I started working with my father – all because of King Abdullah’s decision not to grant my promotion. God bless his soul, he did me a favor.
I started rejecting the proper way to sing and I started singing.
I’ve always wanted to be in journalism. I even started a course at Loughborough doing media studies. I like all sports, and I am keen on writing. But I thought that while I was still young, I ought to make a real go of it at badminton. So I have put all my focus on playing sport instead of writing about it.
The concept of The ‘Most Beautiful Moment in Life’, that was chapter one for us; it feels like that because we were starting from the bottom, but on this concept, ‘Love Yourself’, we started to talk about some brighter things, like the real things in life.
When I first started all this, it was mostly music fans that came along, Stones fans. But now, I’m being taken seriously. I’ve got highfalutin’ art collectors and everything!
I just feel like I have when I started making a lot of money, I started spreading it out to people. Mickelson, the whole deal, the over-tip: if I see a guy that looks like he needs a hand out or something, I’ll pull something out and give him something.
I’d like to do a comedy with Emma Thompson. I admire her as an actress so much. I love her. And I didn’t know it until recently that her whole career started in comedy.
I lived in America for a long time before I started working as an actor. Some actors show up on set and have never done an American accent before, so they rely on a slew of technical mechanisms. Part of what makes an accent is understanding why people speak that way – you have to understand the culture.
What’s that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I’m able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I’m older. Thank God for growing up.
Black Lives Matter started from a post that I put on Facebook after the acquittal of George Zimmerman. I woke up in the middle of the night sobbing, just trying to process what had happened and wanting to find community around being in a lot of grief and having a lot of rage.
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, ‘Oh, its temporary.’ It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That’s how they work.
