I just started taking Mandarin classes. I love the idea of globalization: of being able to work in different countries.
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. So I was always moving, I'm still always moving.
The first time I sang in church, when I was ten, the applause was so overwhelming that I started to weep. My mum had to rescue me from the stage.
I remember a distinct moment when it was my junior year of college, and the content I was making was changing and not really myself, and I tried to switch back to just putting me out there. I'm happy that happened really early in my career, because that was before I started doing podcasts or writing.
I played football for Leeds United under-18s, but at 17 my eyes started to go and I had to wear glasses. The football had to go - there were no contact lenses in 1957.
I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
I did, like, a couple of sexier videos, because all of a sudden I went, 'Wow, I have a body. I have this side of me that I haven't shown yet.' And I started kind of playing around with that side of things.
I started piano when I was four. My mom taught me. And then I went to Manhattan School of Music during high school, like every Saturday. And then I went to Berklee for college, in Boston.
When I started writing about vampires, I swore that I wouldn't touch the 'Dracula' legend because it's been done too many times.
Everybody in America started to define themselves by all these things they had around them. And all of a sudden it came tumbling down. So the old American dream has died, and that is a good thing.
When I started the Imagination Library in my hometown, I never dreamed that one day we would be helping Scottish kids.
Headwise, I always kind of knew that everyone goes grey in our family very early - and I was like, it works for me. I started growing my beard, and it changes the shape of your skull and your face, and I started seeing my mother's side of the family in myself for the first time.
I was nerdy and really into computers. I was a good student until my senior year, when I started traveling and had a lot of absences.
When the women's movement started in the 1960s, there was a vision of a future where women didn't wear makeup or worry about how their hair looked, and everybody wore sensible, comfortable clothes. It ran into an absolute brick wall.
Writers always say, 'I always knew I wanted to be a writer; when I was a three-month-old foetus a pen formed in my hand and I began to scratch my first story on the inside of my mother's womb.' I started later, in my early twenties.
The minute I started doing comedy, the doors opened.
Since I started acting, I've always been aware of the sort of 'beastly entity' that is America and Hollywood, and semi-consciously, I devised a kind of route in - I'd seen a lot of people try and fail.
President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. Listen to me now. No president, not me, not any of my predecessors, no one could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.
I started as an engineer. I migrated to philosophy and international politics. And I did my studies about African - Africa democracy and democratization in Africa, taking Kenya as a model. And then, while I was doing so in 1996 in South Africa, Al Jazeera was established. So they requested me to be an analyst on African affairs.
My wife, Sharon, and I started with nothing when we got married. I was driving a 1902 Pinto and eating off a card table.
I started singing at age five and haven't stopped since.
My mom was an actress, so I got with her boutique agency back in 2001 and started booking a few commercials. She's like my co-manager.
I'm a lad of the '60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.
All my books are very spiritual. I started out writing what was most natural to me, many years ago, which is religious, because I grew up in the jungle, the son of missionaries. I want to know, is God real? What's a priest's role?
My grandparents actually, whenever they got the chance, took me to Broadway, but that started when I was in high school, because that's when I realized... At the very beginning of high school, I realized, 'Oh my gosh. Okay, this is a career choice for me.' So yeah, then they always brought me to New York to see Broadway shows whenever they could.
I don't know how you can do comedy once every two weeks. Ever since I started, if I'm off for three days, I got to learn how to do comedy again.
I was on Facebook. I was on MySpace. And somebody said to me, You should check out this thing called Twitter. I knew five people that were on it, so I started following those people and seeing what they were doing, and then I applied my own sensibility to it. The more that I shared, the more people started following me.
I started off in drama, and there are so many women that I admire. Women in this industry are gladiators. Cicely Tyson, Viola Davis, Taraji Henson, Regina Hall, Regina King.
My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.
Often I feel that projects overwhelm us when we look at how many hours are involved until completion. But just getting started is usually not that difficult.
In 2006, I started making a film called 'Restraint of Beasts.' While I was making it, I had a personal disaster. My wife fell ill, so we stopped shooting halfway through. And then sadly, my wife died.
Part of why I started a band was due to feelings of shyness and social ineptitude. I saw it as some way of being able to interact with people from a safe distance.
The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.
I remember the youth movement in 1968. It started on American university campuses as a protest against the Vietnam war, then came to Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin. Within a year, you had an uprising of youth against their elders.
I was fantasising about my own death, I started thinking what my funeral would be like and what music would be played, I was at that level of insanity.
As I graduated from public schools and started working in newsrooms, I told myself that I am only the 'illegal' that my own country has not bothered to get to know.
