When I thought about having the greatest impact with my life, I thought about all the times people lose loved ones because diseases weren't detected early enough. I thought, 'I can play a role there.'
Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.
When I was younger, I liked money - the feel of it. I would sit with my dad and count his coins and be like, 'Yeah.' I'd saved £700 by the age of 10. I thought: 'What the hell am I hoarding this for?' So I bought a drum kit.
I thought if I really wanted to be serious about writing, I should make my own desk.
It's so hard for me to kind of fall in love with comedy, but if something comes my way... I mean, I loved 'Weird,' I thought that was a really fun character.
Because I'd done 30 plays or so at Oxford, I thought that I was an actress anyway because that's what I was doing!
It's so deeply disturbing to me that half of the eligible voters don't vote in this country. We talk about how divided the country is. The truth is, we don't even know. We just know what the half that voted thought.
I didn't think marriage worked. I thought everybody who was married was secretly miserable - that it was something they just put up with for their children.
When I was in school, I really thought about soul a lot. I was listening a lot to Bjork and to the Commodores. I really wanted to know how they felt. And especially with Bjork, the music there told me wow, that's really her soul there.
I don't care that people thought I was one way for my whole career because now that I am not attached to a team, I can have my own opinion, I can have my own voice. I can link myself to my own thought process rather than a generic message most teams try to get across.
I never thought I'd be traveling the world supporting my music. Everybody seems to really enjoy the music because it comes from me, and I'm proud of it.
You have to believe in yourself. But you know what? There's a fine line between believing in yourself and being delusional. And I'm sure there were a lot of people who thought I was being delusional when they saw me attempting to become a big shot in the world of pro wrestling. Luckily, it worked out: it doesn't work out for that many people.
Perhaps this is because I'm from the generation that grew up watching 'The Jetsons' on TV, but I really thought we would be much more advanced in the areas of transportation and medicine.
If your agent or publisher is jumping up and down at the thought of your novel, it's because they're picturing the movie poster on the side of the bus.
I don't Tweet a lot because I've Tweeted things that I thought were really innocuous about subjects that are inflammatory, and the response is so insane sometimes from people.
As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day.
For starters, I wanted to do an acting role in a movie that had nothing to do with the music business or in which I would play a singer or a songwriter. When I act, I don't even want to be thought of as Ne-Yo.
I wasn't naive, but at the end of my Miss America year, when two different executives attacked me during what I thought were informational interviews about jobs, I was shocked. I didn't see it coming, and the worst thing about it was the shame I felt, as if I'd done something wrong.
I'm particular about the projects that I've chosen. Each one of them, I've taken a step up, like climbing a ladder. Before, it was baby-steps, up to 'Riddick.' Then I took this huge leap onto 'Guardians!' It was such a higher level, this huge project which originally I never thought I'd have a chance in hell of getting.
I feel like everything is inspired by something else. There is no 100 percent original thought.
Some of George W. Bush's friends say that Bush believes God called him to be president during these times of trial. But God told me that He/She/It had actually chosen Al Gore by making sure that Gore won the popular vote and, God thought, the Electoral College. 'That worked for everyone else,' God said.
I've done a couple of conferences where you sit and sign autographs for people, and then you have photographs taken with them and a lot of them all dressed up in alien suits or 'Doctor Who' whatevers. I was terrified of doing it because I thought they'd all be loonies, but they are absolutely, totally charming as anything. It's great fun.
I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.
Darwin gives courage to the rest of science that we shall end up understanding literally everything, springing from almost nothing - a thought extremely hard to comprehend and believe.
I thought the Secret Service would protect me from the press, but they were at my house to protect me from assassins with guns, not with assassins with pencils.
Marlo taught me things I thought I knew.
None of my sisters are in the movies, nor are my nieces going to be. That's how Dutt 'sahab,' my dad, brought up the girls in the family, and I am just carrying his thought forward.
Difficult times disrupt your conventional ways of thinking and push you to forge better habits of thought, performance and being.
I always thought of my career as a body of work and not just about numbers.
Naturalization is the process by which a citizen, or subject of a foreign nation or kingdom, is made a citizen of the United States. It is evident that the Constitutional Convention thought that it was important that this process should be placed under the exclusive control of the Federal Government and not of the States.
I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.
Colors answer feeling in man; shapes answer thought; and motion answers will.
When I was 15, I didn't think I was the prettiest at all. But then something happened when I was 20-something - I thought, actually, I really like what I look like. Just because I don't look like everybody else doesn't mean that I can't be just as beautiful.
I grew up in a working class family. People thought I might go work at a mill. My mom wanted me to learn how to lay carpet because she was concerned about my future. Nobody had high hopes for me. But I was a hustler.
I thought, 'Nobody wants this book, and I'm an idiot for having worked on it so hard.' But to succeed in writing, you must be willing to look stupid for a long time. 'Pachinko' took so long because I got it wrong so many times.
Menshn is a play on the word mention, and in the U.S. that's how it'll be perceived. Like Tumblr or Flickr. People in the U.K. thought that I'd named it after myself.
