It sounds like I'm joking when I say it, but when I wrote 'Take Me To Church' and a lot of these things, I didn't think they would be hits. I thought I was writing for a potentially smaller audience.
Honestly, I never thought we'd get a nomination for a Grammy, period. To be honest, we felt that if we were ever going to get one, we thought we had 'City of Evil' and 'Nightmare' and 'Hail to the King,' and those were all big records, and they never even sniffed at us.
That's the nice thing about being a live act. I can get the audience, but it's for the moment. It's like, 'Can I do it tonight?' And you can see when people like you. But on record - and with the pen - it's almost for all time. Really, a lot more thought has to go into it.
Growing up, the last thing I ever thought I'd do is be an entertainer.
A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?
I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions.
I don't let a lot of people know about my dad dying on 9/11. It's not a way to introduce yourself. So I never told anybody, and then I would do jokes about it... and I think people thought I was lying about it. Which would be crazy!
After 'Roe v. Wade' - when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973 - I thought the national conversation about abortion and birth control would be over. It was not.
People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of 'Hitchhiker's,' and I thought, 'No, no.' I didn't want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I'd already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.
I typically don't get into predicting the success of my projects. I've been involved with a lot of projects that I thought should have really gained notoriety and furthered my career, only to be met with the cold grasp of disappointment. So I typically stay away from predicting how a film will do.
I'm not the least bit polished, I come from a blue collar background and I never thought I could feel comfortable around the English.
There's a certain thought process about actors that they are in Hollywood and they sit around pools and get suntans and just get offered jobs.
I grew up in Canada and was a huge Spider-Man fan, and never thought of Spider-Man as an American hero.
I was a crazy little seven-year-old. I used to get up an hour early to watch the big kids train. I thought, 'I must absorb their awesomeness.' That was my goal from when I was seven. I told my coach, 'I'm going to the Olympics.'
I thought acting was just going on and remembering all of one's lines.
Before I had satellite radio installed in my car, I thought I would lose my mind listening to commercials and having limited choices on the dial. Your car is your home in L.A., so you've got to have some good stuff to listen to.
A man man may dwell so long upon a thought that it may take him prisoner.
We didn't build the interstate system to connect New York to Los Angeles because the West Coast was a priority. No, we webbed the highways so people can go to multiple places and invent ways of doing things not thought of by the persons building the roads.
I was in a steak house once, and someone proposed. I was so embarrassed. The woman started crying, and I thought, 'She was just proposed to in a steak house - I'd be crying, too.'
I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.
I love my career. I thought, if I was lucky, I would retire as a senior intelligence officer, still working on the issues of counterproliferation. But that didn't happen, so - new chapter.
I woke up one morning to an email from my friend Alex that said she'd had her bag stolen. Ordinarily, I'm quite quick on the uptake, but - maybe because of the way it was worded - I immediately replied, 'What??????' As soon as I hit send, I realised I was being scammed. But then they replied, and I thought, 'Well, why not?'
I started out writings songs for what I thought was going to be a maximum of five people down our local pub.
I really just wanted to be a writer, but people tell you, 'You should have a backup career,' so I thought, 'OK, I'll act.' That was the foolishness of my vision for my life - that my backup career would be completely undependable.
I thought I was clever by greeting casting agents in my Australian accent and then switching to an American one during the performance. But the Australian accent seemed to put them off. Now it's the opposite; they love Australians. And with my thick Californian accent I now have a problem convincing them I'm Australian.
I was born a proud daughter of Pakistan, though like all Swatis I thought of myself first as a Swati and Pashtun, before Pakistani.
I remember seeing Tony Bennett on television. He was the only guy in the orchestra who was wearing a white tux, and I thought, 'That would be good. To be the only man on stage in a white jacket.'
When I started doing advertisements, I really enjoyed the whole process of shooting, and I realised that I could do the little bit of acting required quite easily. My directors also told me that I have a flair for acting and that I should polish it and try for films. Then I thought I probably had it in me - why not give it a shot?
I always thought I'd eventually learn how to draw really well, and despite constant evidence to the contrary, I just kept on trying. If you're too good at anything, you don't have to think about the process, whereas I feel like I spend my life with my head under the bonnet, trying to understand how everything works.
I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.
Certainly, Occupy Wall Street protesters have different ideas about the movement's mission. Many of the marchers I met even disagreed on the purpose of their trek - some thought it was about getting to Washington to protest the 'supercommittee'; others thought it was about visiting other Occupations.
I went to Bruges for a weekend away from London. I was supposed to be meeting a girl there the next day. It was a tentative arrangement. From the moment I saw the town, I thought, 'This place is just so cinematic, so gorgeous.' Every corner seemed to offer a new image.
I started, obviously, doing theater, and I always thought that I would; in a way, I always thought that I'd be a theater actor. When I was starting out, I didn't really plan on making films, actually.
I saw 'Billy Elliot' again, and what I loved about it was the way it had become a social document, a reminder of what happened with the mining communities in the '80s. And I thought, 'Everyone keeps wanting me to make a sequel to 'Beckham,' but maybe a musical remake is the answer, embracing all this theatricality.'
I actually didn't like Jane Austen. I was more into the Brontes. They were so wild and passionate. I thought there was something a bit tame about Austen.
We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand windmills at any price.
