I was in Toronto with my parents, and my dad took me to an outdoor hockey rink. I was 3 or 4, and I just remember everything about that day. For some reason, I thought, 'This is it. This is what I'm supposed to do.' And this is around the time that Gretzky came to L.A., so I immediately joined a hockey league.
Any well-read man knows that the moral difference between the condition of the world before Christianity was planted and since Christianity took root is the difference between night and day, the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of the devil.
My parents took a fairly liberal approach at raising me, always encouraging me to be creative and free-thinking.
If you took away all pain, if everyone lived forever, everything would be bland, flat and boring; there would be no reason for art, music, newspapers, love because we would all be in a mono state of happiness.
When I was in college, my parents' house burned down, and took a lot of the possessions I'd grown up with. That's probably one thing that made me realize material stuff is not really that important.
When you're a front man for a band, there's nowhere to hide. It took me a long time to get used to that. But music is my first love. I started singing when I talked.
It took me a long time to know enough about writing to really write short stories. You can't just immerse yourself, as you do in a novel, and see where everything goes. Novels are a very flexible, accommodating form. Short stories aren't.
I was the first companion to kiss the Doctor. I played Grace Holloway to Paul McGann's Doctor in the 1996 TV movie. We shared three kisses, in fact: very sweet and chaste. When I took the part, I'd never even heard of 'Doctor Who.' No one warned me that the kisses would be a big deal.
I've always had to force myself to make friends and speak to people. My parents were quiet, and it took me a while to get used to the fact that people talk about their feelings, their problems.
So many of Spielberg's films inspired my imagination growing up. And then there are British films like 'The Full Monty' and 'Waking Ned Devine' that took me to places I really loved, with characters I just thought were amazing. But the films of Luc Besson showed me France - a really cool side of France.
I took the 'Lee' from my grandparents, who took care of me during the day while my mom was away working.
I put on 'Starstruck' for my kids, and they started getting bored. I was so upset, I took it off. They preferred 'Home Alone.'
I was the class clown in high school, but I always took it too far, so nobody liked me. I was annoying. Like, I would get a laugh and then keep going and keep going.
Remember the Y2K bug? Ahhh, those were the days... I'll never forget that New Year's Eve. My wife and I were in Golden Bay dancing with her parents to Abba songs when suddenly, the rain began to fall. I took it as a sign from Mother Nature that everything was gonna be okay. Sure enough, the clock struck 12, and life went on as normal.
I found it really hard for a couple of years to do any writing because all I wanted to do was play the fiddle. From the minute I took it up, I just couldn't put it down.
Shifting toward management meant greater responsibility and influence, but it also meant giving up programming day-to-day in my role, which was hard because it took me out of my comfort zone.
When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.
When I was a kid, I saw 'Rambo First Blood', and the next day, I took knives to school and threw them at everybody. So I was definitely influenced by violent films before 'Drive.'
I used to hate stilettos. It took me a lot of time to understand how to walk in them and look graceful. And eventually, you realise their importance.
My agent in Sweden used to send off interview tapes but I decided to take it upon myself and come to London to visit casting directors which is when things first started taking off for me. I love Sweden but the industry out here is quite small so when I was given the chance to go internationally I took it.
Never change the URL of your blog. I've done it once, and I lost much of my readership. It took several months to build up the same reader patterns and trust.
I started doing theater at the age of six. I also took tap and jazz lessons. I refused to take ballet, which is one of my biggest regrets to this day.
In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.
I liked Shakespeare in high school, but in university I spent a semester studying in London, and it was sort of in the middle of me falling deeply in love with literature, and I took a Shakespeare course with a professor who couldn't imagine anything more important than Shakespeare.
During the Cold War, America took sides not only in disputes between Arab countries, but also in debates within them.
I took the fear of marriage from my parents' relationship, because I didn't want to end up in a relationship like that, whereas my brothers and sisters learnt a lesson from it and made sure they didn't carry it on into their own marriages.
When disease took my legs, I eventually realized I didn't need them to lead a full, empowering life.
Back in the day, when I was a university professor, I used to teach a class in Human Anatomy and Physiology. This class was popular with the football players, who all took it under the tragic misapprehension that it would be easy.
Mom was a nurse's aide. She worked in various hospitals. She took care of us that way, and we ate government cheese. I survived.
Little Steven - the songwriter, producer, and arranger - stayed alive doing the 'Lilyhammer' score. That pretty much took up three or four years of my life, and all of my musical energy went into that.
My wife and I decided to try and kick start our kitchens to a $15 minimum wage for cooks. I've probably had to go through and raise every menu price now by 50 cents because it took away my profit. I just underestimated what it was going to cost.
If your bank took bailout money, take your money out of that bank and put it in a credit union. Credit unions are owned by the people who have their money in the credit union.
As someone who took an oath to defend this country, I refuse to sit idle until the unimaginable occurs: Iran cheats or simply runs out the clock, and the largest state sponsor of terrorism threatens the United States and its allies with a nuclear weapon.
There was no pomp and ceremony in connection with the birth of Jesus - rather the opposite: it took place in simplicity and in poverty.
I started to watch 'Play for Today' and plays like 'Cathy Come Home,' and Kenneth Branagh's 'Billy' trilogy in the 1980s, which took us into the world of the Belfast family. As a kid in Luton, how was I ever going to know that world otherwise?
It took me ages to grow into being a woman, into being happy with it.
