After I graduated, I tried Broadway, which was difficult for me. It was tough to get a part on Broadway, so I just started talking to audiences at different social gatherings, and little by little I became Don Rickles - whatever that is.
Not to this extent but from day one I had an awful lot of confidence when I got started.
When I started acting... the community was largely Chinese-American or Japanese-American, so even then I felt like a minority in the minority.
When I first started acting I was about nine years old. I had never been to audition in my life and my agent sent me out. It was just a commercial for 'Harry Potter.' That was the first thing I ever went out for and I got the 'Harry Potter' commercial which was really cool, but I didn't play Harry Potter.
When I started out, everyone seemed to be adopting these names... Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious. I wasn't really Rotten or Vicious or Nasty, so I wanted something a bit more funny - yet something that seemed real rock 'n' roll... something that acknowledged my ambition.
There's a mass of places, really, where the idea started.
This is my chance to get out there and appease the fans of my music as well as show people that I do do standup comedy because a lot of people don't know that's where I started.
I think we were born 6 feet tall and then started to grow from there. My dad's not particularly tall - only 5 feet, 11 inches - but his mother was almost 6 feet and straight as a ramrod: a German woman who used to scare the hell out of me.
I went into the 'Idol' audition with no expectations; that's just the kind of person I am. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't hurt so badly, you know? But once I made it past the first round, and the second, and third - I started to realize, 'Maybe my goals and dreams really are attainable.'
When you lose a parent at ten years old, the world seems like a much scarier place. It makes complete sense to me that I took survival courses when I was a teenager and started going to war zones as a reporter. I didn't ever want to be taken advantage of, and I wanted to be able to take care of those around me.
Around '75 when the recession hit, club owners started going to disco because it was cheaper for them to just buy a sound system than it was to hire a band.
And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11.
Oh gosh, I noticed dramatic changes in my body after I started doing yoga, but I also think you have to shake things up.
As a kid, I didn't need to be convinced the future promised peril and oppression, so when I started thinking up the middle-grade science fiction novel that became 'The Boy at the End of the World,' it seemed only natural to build the story around a dark vision of the future. In my book, civilization has nearly destroyed itself.
My daughter loves to do art stuff. As a father, I like to play with her. We break out the big pads of paper and the glitter and all the stuff. She likes to do what she likes to do. I want to do something, too. So I've just started using her same materials - a lot of crayons, a lot of sparkle, charcoal, pencils, markers and glue.
I went from two-minute matches when I started with NXT to eight, to 10, to 12.
When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music.
That's the hard part about sport: as men we haven't started to be in our prime, but as athletes we are old people. I needed support. I lost trust and did stupid things.
I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
There were very few women comics when I started out doing stand-up. But I always saw that as a great advantage.
I'm trying to conquer swimming. I'm getting there. I've gotta conquer it. I had a fear of drowning and tunnels and flying. I started flying and got my pilot's license, so I conquered that. Now, I'm onto swimming and tunnels.
Yelp has been in this business since it really became something worth thinking about in 2004, when the transition started happening from the world of the Yellow Pages to the world of searching online for local information.
I started acting when I was 17. I started modeling when I was 13. It helps in the way that you don't get fazed by cameras too much.
I had left the music business and became a conflict journalist. The conflict journalism started for me in the Gulf and the oil spill. When Skynyrd needed a new bass player, they knew me from the Black Crowes.
I started composting in 1970 by taking my food scraps out behind where I lived and burying them in a hole next to the railroad tracks - and green things started to grow there!
We really practice music and work really hard. Sometimes we'll leave at six in the morning, and we started at three the day before.
My agent and I put out my proposal one Thursday afternoon in August, 1998. Publishers started bidding immediately, and that process progressed for a few days.
After I got this job at the syndicate, I started sending them money so they could go on trips and do the things they could never afford to do. All the while, I never knew that my mother was socking money away.
I gave my life to this without knowing what I was doing. I was very little when I started in 5H: I was 16.
I'm definitely inspired by Michael Jackson. I watch all his videos all the time. And Busta Rhymes, early Busta Rhymes - I really was inspired by him. He's really the reason why I started rapping. Because all his visuals. I loved his videos when I was younger.
I got that nickname my first spring training camp with the Expos in 1974. Tim Foli, Ken Singleton and Mike Jorgensen started calling me 'Kid' because I was trying to win every sprint. I was trying to hit every pitch out of the park.
My grandmother taught me that accomplishments meant less than what you left behind. I started to ask myself what impact my comedy would have on people's lives. And that changed my act. I got cleaner. I stopped talking about generic stuff like airplane peanuts and started speaking the truth about my gift.
It wasn't easy in the 1970s when I initially started on my mission - to take yoga to the world. Nobody knew what it was in Japan. When I met Bill Clinton for the first time, he asked me if it was a form of yogurt that you eat! But I kept my faith and never gave up on my quest.
I started playing violin in the 5th grade. They had a program in school where you could get out of class to go play instruments. So I raised my hand, left out of class, me and a bunch of my homeboys, just to get out of class for that day. They asked what instrument you wanted to play and I picked the violin.
President Obama's reelection started the countdown for lawmakers to address the fiscal cliff and the statutory debt limit. Unless the President and House Republicans can agree on changes to current law, the U.S. economy will be in recession by spring.
I started by looking at what others had done before me. You see, over the years there have been attempts by many different people to reconstruct the chariot.
