Back in the days of the Smiths, when we first started touring England - this is, like, 1984 - there were these two girls. They were literally vicar's daughters, and they used to follow us to every gig, no matter where we went.
I was raised Catholic and I went to church until I was 16. I went through a phase when I was 15 of being quite fanatically Catholic. I was going to church a lot, receiving communion, saying the Rosary, praying, all that stuff. But when I started scrutinizing it, it just fell apart so quickly.
Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.
For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now.
I believe that for all of us, there was this one moment in our early life when we started being obsessed about music, somehow feeling how 'big' it is and is what it can give us. For me, this was when I got to be as a 9-year-old on stage, performing in Verdi's Otello in the children's choir.
When I started to write realistic, real fiction, the voices that were the strongest for me - the characters that I heard, the people that I knew - were the ones from my childhood.
My heart started running away, like a pack of horses. Then it slowed down and became irregular.
When I started out, I tried out all my stuff on national television. There were no comedy clubs, but even if there were, I don't think I would have gone to them. I used to do stuff in the bathroom, and then I'd drive down to NBC and do it on 'The Golddiggers' with Dean Martin.
I started 'The Rainmaker' in August 1996, and I've been working consistently ever since. It's not like I had some grand plan; I keep getting offered jobs so good I can't say no.
I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!
When I started wrestling, I started only to get in shape. I found out that a wrestling school had opened in Ireland, and I wanted to go because I was hanging out with the wrong crowd and I wanted to turn my life around.
When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
For seven years after college, I was a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley, and from there I got a job at Merrill Lynch as an account executive, from where I went to vice president of investments for Prudential-Bache Securities. I started my own firm in 1987.
I started modelling quite late, at 20. In this industry, girls start when they're barely even 14 or 15.
I used to hate performing in front of anybody, but I was forced to sing in front of family, at family gatherings. Then it slowly developed, and I started to love it.
I didn't know anybody who was a filmmaker - there was no film industry where I grew up. I never knew what a director really did until I was in high school and I started reading up about it. I've always loved films, and I always felt like a storyteller.
I started writing when I started acting professionally because, with acting, there's so much time when you're not working, and there's so much rejection and so little you have control of. Writing is something that you can do, and no one can tell you not to.
I built a company, a team, and a brand that started right here. It was an American success story, and it started right here in Arizona.
When I started getting so many haters and closed doors, I decided to prove that it could be done. I was a divorced single mother of three at the time and a size 12 - not your typical model artist that labels feel work for the music industry.
I was terrified and confused every day of my life until I started Nasty Gal, and for a good while after as well.
When counting on learning from innovation, there are great successes but also failures. The Wright Brothers invented the aircraft and started an amazing process of innovation, where we now have planes that carry 500 passengers. Along the way there were some silly looking vehicles that crashed early on.
I learned my color in Europe. I've always been a colorist, I think. I started when I was very young, being a bird-watcher, fascinated by the bird colors.
When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.
My manager said it would more effective against left-handed hitters. It seemed to me that was impossible to do without the high leg kick, which I started that day.
I think I first got into acting through church. I would go to these church retreats, and they would tell us to make a skit or make a video and present it to the rest of the group. And I started doing that. And I fell in love with it.
In the early '70s, I started to feel like Philadelphia soul was the black-sheep brother of rock and roll. I decided to try to get away from it.
I started Save the Libraries in 2010 by hosting a big fundraiser in my city library of DeKalb County in Atlanta. Through that, I learned that even with fundraisers, libraries often don't make money - they just barely break even.
As a kid it's adorable to have a gap in your teeth. But then, because of the shifting in my mouth, I started whistling through it, and as a 32-year-old woman, whistling while you speak in sort of annoying.
I loved my soap days. I really loved them. A Martinez and Marcy Walker taught me how to act, basically. All those people pulled together and helped get me started. Like, showed me how to hit my mark, made me do this, made me do that. That was my first long-running professional gig. And it was like, they were just - great, great with me.
The thing that started the peace movement in Ireland was anger - my anger. It wasn't anger; it was fury.
I wasn't that great in sports. I started doing children's theater and loved it. I thought I had a great thing going with musicals. I thought, 'I can do this. It's fun.' I wanted to go for it, and I thought I'd like to make a living doing this.
When I first started acting, I was just crap.
I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'
When I first started out in Houston, it was theater or bust. And I loved it. I still love it. And then I went to undergraduate and graduate school for acting.
'Saturday Night Live' was actually started with a show that Lorne Michaels and I did at a summer camp called Timberlane in Ontario when we were 14 and 15. We would do an improvisational show with music, comedy and acting.
When I first started at HSN, I knew that retailers would have to be poised to take advantage of technology and the rapidly changing ways in which people shop. It was one of the things that drew me to the company.
