I wanted to explore what all this new-found wealth means for the different generations of Chinese who have to live together in this place that is transforming at warp speed into the richest country on the planet.
It was not hard for me to find guidance and motivation. I'm very blessed, and my parents were always so supportive of myself and my brother. Whatever you wanted to do, you just had to give 110 percent. So whatever that was, they supported it.
I never wanted to be a writer. I mean, that's the last thing I wanted.
Since I was a teenager, I wanted to be in a band with my mates: my pure image of a band.
My parents were quite strict; we couldn't just listen to whatever music we wanted. It was very much like they monitored what we listened to.
I was really interested in acting and thought secretly I could do it but didn't tell anyone. It was a quite private thing that I wanted to do.
I was on the SWAT team in the FBI, and I had always wanted to be in SWAT.
I always wanted to be an actor, but I always loved design, and growing up in New Orleans there was such great style, great architecture. I would decorate my little apartment in New York over and over again, because it only had a couple of rooms. And I did it for friends and family on the side just for fun.
Everything about the movie 'Dope' is real artistry, and everybody put their full hearts and souls into it. It's a passion project; it's not one of those things everybody got paid a million dollars to do. Everybody on there wanted to do it. Everybody there believed in the project, and we just went for it. We all love each other.
I have had the good fortune to be able to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. I have enjoyed the freedom I had gained from building a successful business from scratch, making some money, and creating the lifestyle I wanted.
I've always wanted to become a professional soccer player.
I wanted to take nouvelle cuisine further, to the point where we were breaking down the essence of taste and sensation, reconfiguring food as a series of really intense hits on the tongue.
From a child, I knew I didn't have the face I wanted to have. My mother was a baroness. She was from Berlin; she was a silent movie actress and friends with Marlene Dietrich. So she knew all about film make-up and prosthetics and stuff like that and what they used to do in those days. And she taught me all that as a child.
We were doing mobile games before the iPhone. We were doing free-to-play with 'Quake Live.' We wanted to do massively multiplayer stuff in the early days but didn't have the resources to do it.
Texas is really special in that we have our own music scene, our own music chart. It's almost a genre on its own. It feels like you can make a great living just touring the state because it's so big, but eventually, I wanted a new challenge.
When I was a kid, I always wanted to live in California because I liked skateboarding.
I feel that I've done what I wanted to do, and that makes me feel fairly content.
In research, I wanted to establish the medicinal chemistry/bioassay conjugation as an academic pursuit, as exciting to the imagination as astrophysics or molecular biology.
Musicians play music because you love... I loved to play drums since I was five. It's all I ever wanted to do. Rock stars, or as we call them, posers, guys who want to just look great, dress great. They're not musicians; they're looking for the fame.
I never grew up thinking I wanted to be a quote-unquote star or anything. My thing was just feeling blessed to be able to make my living acting.
As an actor, when you want to capture the spirit of the character, and the character exists in all of the iterations slightly differently, you work towards getting a sense of what the creators wanted to do, you know? Then, you work off of that.
I love being around kids. I couldn't figure out why all these 70-year-olds wanted to hang out with me when I was 27. Now I understand, and I'm trying to steal their energy from them like they stole from me at the time.
Basically, one of the hardest things about being an actor is getting your first break. I'm a product of nepotism. The doors were open to me. I'd done several movies before I decided what I wanted to do.
Actually, I really wanted to play against Venus because I have so much respect for both Serena and Venus.
I wholeheartedly rejected anything remotely feminine but was not enthusiastic about anything masculine, either. I did not want to cook and have babies, and I did not want to be an engineer or a baseball player or a soldier or a politician or any of the myriad careers open mostly or solely to men. I wanted to be a poet.
I began to think, now is the time. I found quite a lot of opposition in Hollywood about the idea of doing a film musical and we ended up having to buy the rights back. I'm glad we did because it meant John and I were able to make exactly the movie we wanted.
As an undergrad, I studied engineering physics at the University of Oklahoma, and all my degrees are from engineering departments. My father wanted me to join him in the oil-field business in Oklahoma, but I wanted to be a scientist.
I'm not running for state Senate because I wanted to become a politician. I'm running because I wanted to serve.
I always wanted to tell stories and act.
When I was younger I wanted to be a gymnast, but they have to be quite short - I was tall.
I read so much Harry Potter, that's, like, all I wanted to talk about. I watched stuff like 'Lizzie McGuire.' I watched things that were very mainstream but white, and I went to a predominately white school.
I realized that after years of studying Shakespeare and Chekhov and regional repertory theater, what I really wanted to do was bust in and rob a bank and jump in the screaming getaway car and tear through the city and get in a shootout.
It's not like we wanted to talk about the fact that we're gay all the time, but the world has forced it to be an issue.
I used to work at a catering hall in Hauppauge. Anybody who works as a server in a catering hall, more power to you, but I wanted to make music.
I was running track early in my years and I was breaking track records in sprint running. I was training and I wanted to be in the Olympics. I thought I was going to be able to win a gold medal, and my mind was pretty much set on 'this is what I want to do'.
Pop is a little bit theatrical. That's the whole vibe. That's the point - is that it's great music, great melodies, great hooks. But, on top of it, it's a presentation. There's a showmanship about it. And that's why I wanted to be a pop star.
