When the audition for 'Cats' came up, even though I'd been making pop records, it felt like something I was attracted to.
When I was younger, we'd stay at stately homes, and at the end of dinner, women would have to leave the table. I used to sit there. I wouldn't leave. I felt England should come out of the Victorian era.
I always felt that church is where I'm going to find my community and people to live my life with.
From a young age, I had done a lot of theater and musical theater. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but every time I was away from acting, I just felt very incomplete and a little stir crazy.
I naturally have a me-against-the-world mentality, and I've been fighting it since I was 13. It's felt like it's only gotten me in lonely, angry places.
I've never felt nervous in front of big crowds and in big stadiums.
I was a serious competitive figure skater and still ice-skate as much as I can. Anyway, I once brought a date to the rink to have him experience what I was into. So all is going fine, and then - bam! - he bit it extremely hard! Skate time was over. His bruises were scary. I felt so bad.
On 'Dawson's Creek,' those kids were supposed to be outsider kids - you know, wrong-side-of-the-track kids, weirdo kids. And I just felt like there's no universe out there where Katie Holmes isn't the prom queen, hottest girl in school.
Randy Wittman told me not to shoot 3-pointers. That got me very uncomfortable. There were certain labels tagged on me very early in my career, spots on the floor where I felt uncomfortable.
In the '80s, I got tired of the rat race. It was a terrible time for music. I wasn't part of that whole MTV craze. I did 'Go Ahead and Rain,' which was Madeleine Stowe's first bit, but felt no connection to it. I went many years where I didn't have to work.
To be at acting school, it was kind of the first time you felt the freedom to be as much of yourself as you wanted. People weren't going to judge you.
Predating the Internet and predating videos, you had an active imagination. You would hear sounds and then get mental pictures of what these sounds felt like to you. It engaged you and made you more invested in it. It made you want to get tickets to the show, buy the album, put the poster on the wall. Now it's sensory overload.
Well, I was a big fan of the book and therein a huge fan of the girl Precious. And so I felt like I knew this girl. I felt like I'd grown up alongside her. I felt like she was in my family. She was my friend and she was like people I didn't want to be friends with.
After I did 'Lungi Dance' with Shah Rukh, I felt I had achieved everything there is to achieve. But then I am getting to work with Amitabh Bachchan now. And it's really the ultimate Bollywood experience for me. It really can't get any better for me.
There are so many ways of posturing that people associate with being a writer. They imagine you wearing a beret and drinking only red wine and being full of yourself, and so, for a long time, the way I felt about writing was too private. I felt it too important and didn't want to be teased about it. So I lied about it.
Speculative joy, the joy derived from being right and being rewarded, may well be similar to the rush felt by a winning gambler.
I never heard 'I love you' as a child. I never felt pretty or cared for.
When I was younger, I felt very much like, 'Oh, I have to be a certain way, I have to look a certain way.' You really, really don't. That's the way women are treated differently than men. I mean, I've had actors argue with me about this.
We were in Philadelphia when Manager Pat shifted me from third to short, and right off the bat, I knew I had found my dish. Footwork was more a part of the new position than it had been at third. I suddenly felt I had sprouted wings. A world of new possibilities opened for me.
Being interviewed is an odd experience for me because I was an actor a long time before anyone ever asked me a question about myself. When I started being interviewed, I definitely felt I was being asked to defend or explain myself.
What it meant for me to win the Emmy is I found it. It's not just the award. It's what it's going to mean to young girls - young brown girls, especially. When they saw a physical manifestation of a dream, I felt like I had fulfilled a purpose.
When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.
They decided to no longer air my messages on 'The Hour of Power.' They felt they could have greater impact if they had lots of different preachers. 'The Hour of Power' owns the Crystal Cathedral, and the owners, in effect, evicted me... so that they could have other preachers on Sunday mornings.
My mom just wanted me to do anything that was academic, whether it was become a doctor or be a lawyer. Engineering suited her... then I dropped out. It was not what I wanted to do at all; it just felt so unnatural, and I couldn't put my finger on why. I just knew it wasn't for me.
I think I always felt like an outsider, like a weirdo.
I remember, when I was young, to have a literary or artistic vocation was really dramatic because you were so isolated from the common world. You felt that you were marginal, and if you dared to try to organise your life around your vocation, you knew you'd be completely segregated.
The first time I was given money to shop for myself, I was 13 and staying with my godmother in New York. I went to Clinique and bought the three-step acne programme and felt so grown-up.
I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.
No matter what decision I make, I want people to know that there's a reason I made it, and it's because it was something I felt like needed to happen. I don't want people to think that I've just gone crazy.
I did not compose my work as one might put on a church vestment... rather it sprung from the truly fervent faith of my heart, such as I have felt it since my childhood.
Everybody in Spain is sick of me. But in America, there's curiosity about the new kid on the block who doesn't speak English very well. The attention makes me feel vulnerable, which is something I hadn't felt in a while. But I like it.
I'm three-quarters Russian, so I've always felt an outsider. But I don't think you can be in a play with John Of Gaunt's 'This sceptred isle' speech and not feel proud to be British.
It sounds so negative of me to say, but I don't feel like there were many coming-of-age films when I was growing up. I think that when I was a teenager, I felt really misrepresented in the teenage roles that I was watching onscreen. Especially in women.
What can be more stupid than to be in pain about future things and absent ones which at present are not felt?
My art teacher was really encouraging me, because he really liked that I could draw. I felt very torn. At that time, I had to pick one, and I felt much more confident in the arts than I did in chemistry. My big thing was that I actually wanted to be like Jacques Cousteau.
There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'
