I was overwhelmed when people started to know who I was.
I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.
It really started cooking when I moved to Houston. I bought a house and got my own barbeque pit.
I started when I was six years old. My first coach was my granny, she was the best player in Slovakia.
I joined the Wildlife Conservation Society, working there, in 1995, but I started working with them as a student in 1991. I was appointed as a teaching assistant at my university because I accomplished with honor.
As a means to an end, modelling was good, but I had to distance myself from it when I started working as an actress, because even though I wasn't high-profile, I found in my first write-ups that I'd be referred to as 'model Gemma Chan.'
That was the big thing when I was growing up, singing on the radio. The extent of my dream was to sing on the radio station in Memphis. Even when I got out of the Air Force in 1954, I came right back to Memphis and started knocking on doors at the radio station.
I tell my audiences today that I served 10 years in Nashville! That's a joke, of course; I was grateful for the work. Bob Ferguson, who produced Connie Smith, Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, started calling me in.
The real excitement and big deal for me started when I got cast in the first X-Men, which was sort of a fluke.
I didn't feel that running away would change anything but when the roof of the garage started coming off I thought it was time to go.
I can't imagine not coming back to the theater. It's where I started.
We were just emerging from the Depression. Superman started in 1938. Batman started in 1939. So, we were just recovering.
The online video business started in both China and the US around 2005/6, when broadband penetration grew big enough.
He just was being four. He just was being a child. He wasn't interested in what my agenda was. He wanted to do what he wanted to do and it started because he saw the lights on in Toys R Us.
I definitely have moments in my life where I discovered a film, and the language of the film itself spoke to me in a way, as if someone came up to you and started speaking a language you'd never heard but understood and was able to express things the language you knew could not.
When it all started, record companies - and there were many of them, and this was a good thing - were run by people who loved records, people like Ahmet Ertegun, who ran Atlantic Records, who were record collectors. They got in it because they loved music.
I started hustling at 12, my mother hustled ahead of me. I was only allowed to because they knew me.
Before I started doing the film and when I found out I was going to be doing it, I just decided to pump up on the whole cardio stuff. Just in terms of stamina.
When I started out in this business, dance was not at the height it is now. It was almost like, you're either a dancer or an actress.
I wasn't allowed to audition for anything professionally until I was - I guess I cheated a little bit and started when I was in college, but I graduated! Barely.
I wanted to be part of pop culture, so I started songwriting, and I got signed to my first record deal.
I started rapping before anybody had ever bought a car from it. It was truly about the art form and the culture, more so than now, where it's a successful way to make money. Back then you had to be doing it because you liked it.
I'm not like the next Michael Jordan, but I'm also not what everyone saw me as before I started playing in the NBA, either.
But in 2000, the injuries really started to kick in and my elbow gave a lot of problems. At the end of the year I had to take 20 months off before I could come back into the game.
Dysfunctional co-dependent relationships always appeal to me. I don't know exactly how it started. I start writing sketches of characters and little scene-lets, and then it builds.
When I was about 18, I really started diving into Dave Matthews Band and John Mayer Trio and some of those things that have jazz elements but also a pop feel.
Growing up as an athlete, I started skating very young. My parents didn't know anything about the sport, so they went with the flow. I had two great coaches who gave great advice and gave guidelines for my parents. My parents let the coaches dictate what was going on on the ice.
I used a kind of gray-green early on in my practice for painting steel, to make it look more like it had a kind of patina to it, like copper and bronze and so on. The color I used was a Benjamin Moore color called 2012. My then-young daughter started calling me 2012 - it was my nickname.
'Rust' really started with the passing of my dad, and me really looking back inward to my self about where I stand with all things on a faith/religious/spiritual level. And it's really put me on this interesting road and very educational, I might add, road back to understanding the role of faith in God and Christ in my life.
Since the big band started I'm just always swamped with movies and things. It certainly pays the bills and it's very satisfying, because I get to write all these big charts and all this crazy music.
I started at the very highest level so the upper end is something I know very well. I know it instinctively. But all the years I was designing, it frustrated me that I could reach so few women.
We started combining the use of light and the use of theatrics and the use of as many art forms as possible, and it's still growing - that's the whole idea of it.
I started boxing for exercise, and on the very first day, the trainer got in the ring with me and said, 'Whoever controls the breathing in the ring controls the fight.' I immediately passed out.
I started out making skateboard videos. Soon, it dawned on me I just wasn't that great at skateboarding. So I put down the skateboard and just kept going with the camera.
To put it simply, as a black man, I started watching films at the age of six, and I've since seen the bad guys changing race - between the African savages, to the Native Americans, and then the blacks and the Arabs and the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Look at 'Rambo': it's exactly that.
You can't reinvent the wheel. I remember when we first started out at 'Late Night,' we were trying to hire directors, and this guy was like, 'I see you behind a glass desk.' I don't. And he's like, 'Yeah, the glass desk.' I go, 'I don't really see me as a glass desk guy.'
