It all started when I went to this model search in Charlotte when I was 18. That's when I met all these agents and realized I could do it, and I won! I met a photographer at the competition who persuaded me to sign with a different agency than the one that was offered to me. So, I started with a small agency and eventually moved up to IMG.
The song 'What Goes Up' was inspired as I was playing the piano and reminiscing about the Spaceship One launches I witnessed in the Mojave desert. It is an awesome thing to comprehend the magnitude of what a human being dreams and imagines can be realized.
I realized I was gay in the shower one day with Barbra Streisand. It happened while I was lathering, rinsing, and repeating with Pert Plus. As I was belting out the chorus to my favorite song from 'Funny Girl,' 'Oh my man, I love him so, he'll never know...' it hit me.
I was part of a show called 'Manifest Equality' in Los Angeles in 2010, and I realized there was a disconnect between people who are gay or have gay friends and are gay-friendly, and people who think they don't know any gay people.
We realized you cannot create a car by simply gathering needed components.
Ever since I was 16, I've had this lower register, what I thought was a very manly voice, and I was insecure about that. But once I started acting more, I realized it was an asset, and I didn't want to force myself to aim for the highest note possible.
I realized that women's liberation is men's liberation, too.
Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there's been a liberating force that's come from it.
I made a lot of different experiments with tapes at that time, until I finally realized around 1995, that sound is an interesting subject for me. Ever since then sound got more and more integrated into my art works, musically as well as physically.
I suddenly realized that in order to do what I wanted to do, I had to become that which I hated - which is the head of a record company or a digital media conglomerate - and just do whatever you want.
What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.
I was a young-un when I got my first million. Then I realized if I got one, I could get two. If I could get two, I could get ten. If I could get ten, I could get a hundred.
It was a very bizarre experience for me, to get the songs together, go in there, and try to deliver them as I would perhaps in a live setting. But I realized that I couldn't take on that coffeehouse style that I came from and go in there and burn it up.
I'll be honest: I had a real deep-seated fear that 'Buffy' was going to be my peak. It was such a beautiful experience. It was such a fully realized show.
Then the album created a tremendous furor and got me kicked off Christian television for two months, and then restored after they settled down and listened to the music and realized there was nothing wrong with it.
First I wanted to be a veterinarian. And then I realized you had to give them shots to put them to sleep, so I decided I'd just buy a bunch of animals and have them in my house instead.
Everything about it worked, and I don't mean just the movie, but in our experience, we realized there's also a component of luck involved in this business. We had absolutely the most competent people in the studio working on the release and ad campaign.
At one point that's all I cared about, being a pro athlete. But I realized I wasn't athletic enough.
Writing 'Deadpool' can be a lot of fun. When I first started working with the character, I wasn't sure I'd like him. I quickly realized, though, that a writer can do pretty much anything with him - comedic stories, serious stories, completely nonsensical stories.
At 21, my career took a comedic turn when I was cast in a new Broadway play called 'Brooklyn Boy,' by Donald Margulies, which was equal parts funny and sad. I realized that the more seriously I expressed my character's feelings, the funnier the scene became.
It was very early, and we were still like beta or alpha stage, and so we started receiving a ton of download. The server became overloaded, and that's when I realized that this had a huge market.
And at that point, I think we all realized it was something tremendously tragic, probably a terrorist attack, and the next step was to go down to our command center and get things going.
When I was 17 or 18 and it was time to figure out what to do with my life, I realized that I didn't enjoy anything as much as I enjoyed playing music. I felt that I had no choice: that I had to become a musician.
In my late 20s, I realized that I had a very clear social conscience and strong opinions about things like diversity, equality, and education, and while I tried to become more politically literate, I just couldn't catch on. It felt like I had walked into a movie that had already started, and no one would explain what had happened.
I didn't care about that because I'm not a diplomatic person to begin with. I just went along with things and did what I wanted to do because I knew they had to shoot their 12 pages a day. And when they realized that I didn't alter the text they really didn't mind what I did.
I think Mick Jagger would be astounded and amazed if he realized that to many people he is not a sex symbol, but a mother image.
When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small difference between it and my daughters. I thought, we can't keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way.
I started in the supermarket business in the early '70s. And by '75, '76, I realized you don't have a business unless you own the real estate.
My first inkling that I might have a yen for directing came when I realized I enjoyed creating plays for my various sports teams more than I actually liked playing the game.
I grew up with the religion of 'Star Wars,' frankly. That's when I realized there is something bigger out there... and it's called The Force.
In my mid 30's, after a decade or so of giving full time to the music thing and finding myself with about $10 in the bank and no assets other than my musical equipment, I realized I needed to get serious about making a living.
My love was Bob Dylan, but as I got older I realized a good ballad was a good ballad.
Publishers have realized that, unlike the previous time period, American teenagers are both smarter and require more topical material than they had been giving them before that. For one thing, they'll read thicker books. Besides, has anybody looked at the news or read the newspapers recently?
In Russia we had to have special visas in our passports, and when we had to show our passports at the Kremlin gates, we realized that, Oh my God, we're actually playing in THE Kremlin!
I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.
I was baptized alongside my mother when I was 8 years old. Since then, I have tried to walk a Christian life. And now that I'm getting older, I realized that I'm walking even closer with my God.