My dad tells me that he took us to a pantomime when I was very, very small - panto being a sort of English phenomenon. There's traditionally a part of the show where they'll invite kids up on the stage to interact with the show. I was too young to remember this, but my dad says that I was running up onstage before they even asked us.
Have I done more business-related things to help my career grow? Yeah. I took the business end more seriously, hooked up with a manager, got some help, because at a certain point, you get frustrated when you go do auditions, and people say you did a great job, and then you don't get he part.
I wanted to play the piano, but my fingers weren't long enough, so I took up the guitar.
No one can take away the experience of Yeltsin's freedoms, but Russian democracy will never follow Western models: other authoritarian 'controlled democracies' - Turkey, Taiwan, Mexico - ultimately developed into democracies. But it took decades.
I was mugged when I was 12. I had a portable radio, and I ran into this building and these two guys came in and hit me, busted me up and took the radio. After that I was very paranoid and I started taking kung fu and karate. But I didn't want to fight.
Before I left home for drama school in England, my father took me outside one night and told me that wherever I was, the moon would shine on both of us. Months later, walking in London, I'd look at the moon and feel his love. Now I've shared the ritual with my own kids.
When I went to the University of Texas, my first day of freshman year in 1994, I took a student tour, and I asked about the tower shooting. I was told, 'We're really not supposed to talk about that.' That was the official stance from the university.
I did commit to myself that I would not jump back into being the workaholic that I can be before I gave myself an honest opportunity to create the marriage of my dreams and to create the beginning of the family of my dreams, and that took a hot second.
I took my first acting class at age 6 because I found out that's what Carol Burnett was doing - acting. Also she had an imaginary friend as a kid and went to UCLA, two things we have in common. I will always admire her and hope one day, I can make someone laugh a fraction as hard as she's made me bellyache.
When I was a kid, like four or five years old, I was obsessed with the 'Batman' TV show in the '60s. And I took it totally seriously. At that age, I took it completely seriously. I didn't get the fact that it was kind of played for laughs. I didn't understand why my mom was rolling her eyes or chuckling.
When I was a senior in high school, I did an internship with a law firm. And it was very clear that I did not have what it took to do that kind of work.
Mike Matheny, Fernando Vina, Edgar Renteria, Mark McGwire and Darryl Kile... before he died. Those guys took me under their wing and taught me the way to play the game the right way.
My daughter took Latin for three years; she still can't speak it.
I was trying to break out of the suburbs, and when I did break out, I don't think I took my whole self with me - I think I played a role of being too cool and hip.
Before Mint.com, I was a long-time user of 'Microsoft Money' and Intuit's 'Quicken.' Both were powerful tools, loaded with features and functionality around taxes, investment, budgeting - too feature-laden, in fact. They took hours to set up, forever to learn, and an hour a week to maintain.
It took Simone a long time to understand why people want Daddy's autograph. I'd tell her, and my wife would tell her, too, 'People see Daddy in the movies, and they are excited to meet him.' But she couldn't really grasp it.
When I was seven and we lived in New York, I ran away. I took my dog and started out across the Brooklyn Bridge... I didn't get very far... It's rather difficult to run away in your mother's high heels.
When you look out the window of a spaceship, you see entire countries, vast swaths of continents. One turn of the head covers what once took thousands of years to traverse at ground level.
If you took a child in London and took their iPhone and took them somewhere else in the country, they'd probably not be able to find their way back. That's a shame.
My generation took on political equality. I believe young people, who have graduated into a poor economy, have an incentive to take on much tougher issues of income equality. If they show the leadership they have demonstrated in the last few elections, they can bring changes even greater than my generation achieved.
I almost chopped my thumb off once. Just before I left home, I was about ten or eleven years old, and I was trying to open a bone. Can you imagine that? A bone! I was trying to get the marrow out of a bone, and I took the ax, and I went to chop it, and something slipped, and the ax went right down there and damn near cut it off.
I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.
Since I was 8 months old, till I was 12, I did commercials and ads and cute little stuff for kids. Then I had braces on my teeth. They took them off when I was 16, and then I started modeling more seriously and doing more fashion.
In the inner city, there's a mentality that the government owes you something. My breakthrough came when I stopped feeling sorry for myself and took responsibility for every part of my life. No more pity parties. I've gotta love me more than anybody else loves me.
It took years for me to figure out what my body needs and that what works for my friends doesn't necessarily work for me. Doing yoga five times a week has transformed my body.
I love 3-D. I have been a big fan of 3-D for a long, long time. I took my 1988 wedding pictures in 3-D!
In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance, because Party policy decided excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward.
And when you clear away the cobwebs of the description of every job in the world, at the bottom of that job is service. It's service. And I took that ethic and applied it to my writing craft.
Saying I took my clean water for granted is an overstatement. To tell you the truth, I didn't even think about it.
When I started out, I had no idea what I was doing. I was 16, and acting was a new, exciting thing. So, I took it on. It was an excuse to get away from college.
Rock and roll's relatively new, in the sense of the Fifties, Sixties, right? They invented the first sort of rock stars, and they took it to excess, and then the excess became bitter, tormented. Then it became okay to succeed.
Ever since I took to the streets when I was 17 to protest at great personal risk against the communist dictatorship, I have been a passionate democrat.
I think I just took a while to know myself. I went on a journey to find out. I was a bit wild.
At 11, I went to Misha's school for two summers. So when I wasn't in that school, I was taking classes at David Howard or Robert Denver's studios - kind of legendary places - and there was one summer where Alexander Godunov sort of took me under his wing; the memory's a little murky, but I felt as if I was his project for those weeks.
My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn't be able to make it from room to room.
Bulgaria is a true friend of Israel, that stood up to save the Jewish people 70 years ago in Europe, and who stood by throughout the terror attack that took place in Burgas last July.
