There have been times when I felt suicidal and I would stop my head from going in that direction of negativity because I thought there'd be something I'd miss that was funny in the future. If there's a chance I'm going to laugh tomorrow then want to live to experience that.
I'm constantly intimidated by Shakespeare's work. Trying to decipher what he's saying and holding on to that thought - not just as an actor, but as a human being - is a rigour.
I was staying with my sister and messing around with the guitar every day for my own amusement. Then she took me around and introduced me to Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and the first time I saw that onstage, it inspired me to play. I thought that was the world.
People thought me a bit strange at first; a blond haired, blue-eyed Norwegian who sang Mexican folk songs, but I used it to my advantage and got a job. And so the music became my ticket to education.
I find it funny that people now come up to me and say, 'Wow, you are absolutely gorgeous. I'm like, 'I was beautiful before I lost weight. Egotistically speaking, I thought I was amazing.'
I thought that somehow your life would be much different when you're famous... and it's not. You just buy more stuff.
Everything has to be well thought out - what do you really need, when can you do with less coverage.
I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.
I think film cannot only teleport you to places you don't know, but it can help you see people you thought were one way and in fact are another. They can allow us to examine ourselves.
There were movies that always made me want to be a director. You see brilliant scenes and the way the emotions were handled. I thought, I'd really like to do that.
My deal is that I pay more attention to whatever job I have than the relationships I have. Now, if I had considered my job to be a wife and mother, then I would have been pretty good at it. But I didn't consider it a job. I thought it was like brushing your teeth - it's not fun, it's just something you do to keep your teeth from falling out.
My role models were always the Pacinos and the Oldmans, the guys who get dirty with their characters, and I arrived in L.A. during the big boom of 'Dawson's Creek.' I was getting cast as the boy next door, or the friend of the jock. I thought, 'Did I really have to do all that studying?'
Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, 'I want to do that.'
No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.
I had seen 'Avenue Q' off-Broadway back in 2003 and fell in love with it. I just thought it was the smartest, funniest thing I'd seen in a long time.
I find composition difficult. I never thought of myself as someone who can crank it out. I can't crank it out - I have to dig it out the hard way. In some sense, you become more confident in your technical apparatus, but it becomes harder to do something you haven't done already.
I've always thought Anne-Marie Slaughter would make a fantastic United States Senator or something. She's a real intellectual, but she's got enormous communicative skills and she's got government experience. The thing that drives me slightly crazy is the way we think about intellectuals as wooly, hopeless, arrogant, self-deceived, incapable.
I started in Shakespeare. I'm classically trained, which, how hilarious is that? Then one night, I saw Second City and thought, 'Wow, that's what I want to do.' But I never thought it would morph into screenplay writing.
People think that saving the planet or finding their place in that effort is a really overwhelming thought.
Seeing the energy of 'SNL' made me want to be a part of it. If that was a job, I thought, that was the job I wanted. That was my plan. Comedy.
I always tried to move up the food chain. I started with cement and then moved into textiles and banking. When I was trading sugar, I added salt and flour so that then we could do pasta. And then I thought, why not make the bag for it, too? So, we started making packaging.
When I was a kid, I used to try and hit every ball out of the ground. After playing one-day cricket and Test cricket, I never thought I'd get a chance to play like that again, ever. Twenty20 has given me the opportunity of playing like a kid again. I can just feel free and go out there and hit.
I wanted to be a shoe designer, but I never thought it could be a profession. But what was the alternative? Doctor? Too dirty! Air-hostess? Maybe not! Then someone gave me a book on Roger Vivier, and, cheri, instantly I knew that was it!
I always thought there were some people who were just destined to be disengaged in their jobs because that was their personality, and no matter how hard managers tried, there wasn't much they could do with some of those people.
White artists have made millions of dollars off music they stole from black artists. I don't blame all the white artists. I'm a huge Stevie Ray Vaughn fan, and he was always very gracious about where he learned his music. But a lot of the time, you'd think the white guys thought it up. Hey, hasn't anyone heard of Muddy Waters?
I truly thought I was going to be in pop music. And then I joined a choir to meet girls, and everything changed in the first rehearsal.
When I was younger, I was very scared to talk to people. To the point where my parents took me to a therapist because they thought something was wrong with me.
I'm acting for the same reasons I wanted to become a diplomat. I've thought about it a lot and concluded that I wanted to become a diplomat because it was a way to explore human nature. For the same reason that at one point in college, I wanted to be a sociologist.
The thing is, I always thought I could do stand-up, and so I just stayed focused on the belief that I could succeed.
When I met Jo Wilder, I fell crazy in love and never thought about homosexuality. And I thought, 'Well, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. This is life.'
I never particularly thought of myself as great with girls. I can be awkward, and I have a strange sense of humor at times. But I've also been learning to try and embrace that.
I thought I was healthy... well, my eggs were a little powdered.
Maybe I'll get into a Bond film... I always thought I'd be a Bond Girl when I was young.
Prior to Magellan, due to the fact that we knew it was so hot on Venus, we thought that the rocks at the surface would behave more plastically, more like Silly Putty than like solid rock in the way that we think of it, like the rocks that I'm sitting on.
I wrote 'Lights' a long, long time ago. And I expected it to be on the album, because it was - I wrote it with 'Biff' Stannard. And he wrote every single Spice Girls song and every single pop song of the 90s, basically. So I thought, you know, I was really lucky to work with him, but I didn't think it would be a big song for some reason.
I wanted to go to NYU because I thought that was my best path to glory. I figured it was safer to move into the acting world in New York while I was living in a dorm.
