When I read the first 'Sharknado' movie, I thought it was terrible. I told my wife that I couldn't do this movie, that it would be the end of my career.
When my co-founder and I first had the idea for IronPort, an email security company, we triangulated a list of the 20 most relevant people in email - former CEOs, open source technologists, investors and thought leaders.
I give everything far too much thought. If you think you know what you're doing, then you can kind of relax, and then you can improvise and play and just enjoy the day rather than be chasing the lines.
The idea that popular arts were shallow by definition and the traditional arts were profound was dead, I thought, and I wanted to prove it.
I haven't thought of retirement yet, but when I stop enjoying the game or when injuries force me, I will quit.
I did once seriously think of embracing the Christian faith. The gentle figure of Christ, so full of forgiveness that he taught his followers not to retaliate when abused or struck, but to turn the other cheek - I thought it was a beautiful example of the perfect man.
It was a great thing for the Blues boys to do in terms of shaving their hair off for me. The whole squad did it. At first I thought it was only going to be a handful of boys, but fair play, they all did it, and a few of the coaches as well.
I just don't understand how Kerry or Obama or anybody else thought Assad was going to change.
I got scouted when I was 16, almost 17, and it was something that had never entered my thoughts. I never thought I could be a model. I was such a tomboy growing up, and I've never really been into makeup or anything like that, so it was really surprising, but I definitely saw it as an in for acting.
Life just doesn't care about our aspirations, or sadness. It's often random, and it's often stupid and it's often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.
With every year that passes, I get further away from my target audience, and while I've been happy to think of myself as a father figure to these kids, I'd be a little distressed to be thought of as a grandfather figure.
When punk came along, I found my generation's music. I grew up listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, 'cause that was what got played in the house. But when I first saw the Stranglers, I thought, 'This is it.'
My wife and I left New York when she got pregnant - we just thought it would be really hard to stay in the city.
The Pre-Raphaelites, while very bothered by what the establishment thought of them, also utterly rebelled against it. In everything - social, sexual, emotional - they were out on a limb, pushing the boundaries.
Most of the stuff I've ever said is pretty insignificant and, by and large, has been said off the cuff and without much thought to the potential consequences.
Writing 'Book 1: The Maze of Bones' didn't feel much different than writing one of my other novels, but I thought it was very innovative to offer the website and trading card components as well for those readers who wanted to go more in depth with the Cahill experience.
As much as I'd love to be a successful actor, the thought of being recognised in the street is petrifying.
In the modern media age we are rarely surprised by what we see. Whether it's on television or film or in the theatre, everything is so advertised, so trailed, that most entertainment is merely what you thought it was going to be like.
I remember one time when all the nuns in my Catholic grade school got around in a semicircle, me and Mom in the middle, and they said, 'Mrs. Farley, the children at school are laughing at Christopher, not with him.' I thought, 'Who cares? As long as they're laughing.'
I've worn my share of leopard pink boots to premieres or belts the size of cars. I thought my pink leopard boots were so cool.
In Hollywood I thought I was large and klutzy, like the characters I played.
A lot of preconceived notions that I had about fame and status and money and joy and pain, and all of these things that I thought I knew, I didn't.
Since I stayed in a colony where either one was an engineer or a scientist, everybody thought I would be a scientist. This was the expectation everybody had apart from my parents. Honestly, I, too, wanted to be a scientist. I think it was the way Dad would explain us scientific theories and concepts that made the subject more intriguing.
As a senior in high school, you figure out what you want to do with your life. I asked myself if I wanted to get back into acting and thought: 'Yes, but under my own terms and nothing like it was before.'
I was brought up in a very religious household and did a lot of praying throughout a big part of my life and always thought of God as being not only a powerful father figure and the ruler of all time and dimension but also as a friend with whom I could chat and ask questions to and get advice from.
I always thought of myself as a kind of literary bureaucrat. And that was never going to be enough for me.
A lot of our tracks have sounded a lot better than I thought they would because of recording, mixing, and because I probably didn't hear it that way. I'm not a songwriter.
I was a little bit ashamed of American TV because I thought, 'None of the shows my father works on are as funny as my father.'
I travel a ridiculous amount, so I've thought a lot about, and spent a lot of time refining, what I carry and how I carry it.
I didn't really want to be a movie star. I thought they were so screwed up!
There were good jobs, but they were never what I wanted to do. Somehow, people always thought of Wilma Rudolph as a threat.
I was in a really crummy pop-punk band. I think we did a whole bunch of Blink-182 covers, and we were on the fringe of losers and jocks. So we invited all the cool kids to come watch us play in our bass player's brother's bedroom. And it was terrible, but everyone thought we were so cool.
A lot of producers get famous because they decide to be superstars for their own reasons, but I'm inspired by Timbaland and Pharrell and Swizz Beatz 'cause they're doing things that are so different. I like how they're introducing ideas I never would have thought of.
I've always thought it would be interesting to give insight on soccer because I have a lot of experience in my career.
In August of 2011, Steve Jobs, the tech icon who disrupted a string of traditional industries, called me and told me he thought he'd figured out a way to revolutionize TV. He invited me to come see it at Apple in a few months, but he died just six weeks later, and that meeting never came to pass.
I remember when Victoria Wood started to come through, and I thought she was great, though she and I are very different in our approach.
