My son was three months old when I started filming 'The Hobbit,' and I was still breastfeeding.
I'm going to get a pair of wire-snips, and I've also started a new campaign to have blank CDs on jukeboxes so you can play the silence.
It was a terrible blow that was dealt when I was fired from 'Saturday Night Live', but I have to say that a few doors opened right away. Movie roles started to roll in, and pretty soon, I was over 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.
I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.
I started writing in 1948 - basically.
When I started singing, I couldn't be shut up.
I had used the stretch materials for years to shape the inside of garments I made for private clients. Then I just started using them on their own.
My father never wanted me to be a writer. He didn't - he came to terms with it maybe two years before he died. He wanted me to be a weather girl because when I was growing up, there were very few Latinas on television, and in the early '70s when you first started seeing Latinas on TV, they would be the weather girls.
I think of myself more as a character actor than that ingenue leading lady, who started out something like Michelle Pfeiffer, or Jessica Lange. I'm a bit quirkier than that.
I was always singing but didn't plan on pursuing it seriously. When I got to New York City when I was 18, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn - I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point - and that was it.
My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school.
When we started in television, there was that magic box in the corner of the room, and 'Oh my gosh - look what it's doing!'
In high school, my two older brothers ran track. They'd come home sweaty and mud-covered, and I could tell they enjoyed it. So I started running - I ran a mile down the road and back again - and I haven't stopped since.
My first tic was to shake my head violently. I was in karate class, and I was shaking violently. All of a sudden, I just started to notice that the teacher was looking at me, and all the kids were wondering what I was doing. I suddenly felt really strange.
As soon as 'Hide Away' came out, it was like everyone knew who I was, and I started getting all this attention. It was hard to get used to at first. I just remember that I suddenly couldn't walk down the hallways without hearing a classmate or teacher playing it - it was unreal!
The problem with my mother is that she didn't go to the doctor. And I think by the time she started to show symptoms that something might not be right, and finally went to the doctor, she was so close to her death that she couldn't get the care she had needed. Her big issue was not going to the doctor.
I never consciously choose what I'm going to work on next; I don't have an agenda beyond that attraction. Fortunately, my wonderful agent, Christopher Schelling, knows how I think and points me toward things I might like, which is how I started writing Y.A.
I come from the stage, so I started in New York, lived there for eleven years.
My musical taste has always been wide. I started out as a folky before I moved on to blues and soul.
I've done a couple of interviews, and I realized how uncomfortable I felt as soon as I started talking.
I picked up the guitar very late, in a very pagan way - I didn't know how to play, but I knew I had to. I drew and I had a diary, but it wasn't enough; I needed to express more. As soon as I learned two notes, I started to tell a story, which is why, I guess, my music resembles blues or folk.
I started reading G. K. Chesterton's 'The Man Who Was Thursday' on a subway ride, almost missed my stop, and walked home thumbing pages.
I started singing backgrounds for Mary Mary and Usher during 'Confessions.' Then I jumped to working with Anthony Hamilton, Jill Scott; jumped again to Kanye West, The Killers. I kept saying, 'OK, this is the last time; then I get to do my music.'
I started off as a journalist when I was young and I did not get paid unless I wrote three stories a day.
Motherhood was the great equaliser for me; I started to identify with everybody... as a mother, you have that impulse to wish that no child should ever be hurt, or abused, or go hungry, or not have opportunities in life.
I went to an ordinary primary school, and then I started performing in a show called 'Billy Elliot' on the West End, and that was sort of my drama school.
We got a copy of the 'New Statesman' at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The 'Statesman' came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.
I started digging and found that Israel signed a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates after the country had diversified their economy, instead of being solely oil-based. This diversification had brought about modernization. I realized that if you land the price of oil, countries will diversify their economies and as a result, modernize.
Once in a while, when I first started to write pieces, I would try to write to a reader other than myself. I always failed. I would freeze up.
Even though the Clintons started mass incarceration, which my brother is a victim of, things are going to change, though. Somebody made them do that.
I started designing the greenest the most connected home before the iPhone and the iPad.
Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'
Later in high school, I met Hillel Slovak, who was the original guitar player of the Chili Peppers, and we became really close. We had a band, and we didn't like the bass player, so I started playing bass, and I got a bass two weeks later.
People don't understand this, but I started very young, and I became very, very successful at a very young age. By the time I was 26 years old, I was a multimillionaire. And I started with nothing. And I was on the road 10, 11 months a year.
I didn't always spell my name Bil. My parents named me Bill, but when I started drawing cartoons on the wall, they knocked the 'L' out of me.
